Improving Together – CEO Caroline Donovan’s Blog – 17 February 2025
Hi everyone
Welcome to my blog.
Of course I must start with the news we announced last week that our Trust has exited special measures, following a review by NHS England. NSFT is no longer in NHS oversight framework (NOF) segment 4 and has been removed from the Recovery Support Programme (RSP).
We have been in RSP or the previous ‘special measure’ regimes since 2017 - so this is very significant for us, and a huge milestone in our improvement journey. Whilst we are receiving more positive comments about our services from service users and families, and our performance is improving, we still have more to do to make sure service users and families can access our services and receive consistent and high quality support across all our services. Whist we have exited NOF 4, we have moved into NOF 3, which means we will still have oversight but this led more by the regional teams and our local systems.
An enormous thankyou to everyone for your efforts to help us reach this significant milestone. I look forward with huge optimism to the year ahead.
I want to take a moment to reflect on the NHS picture nationally. NHS England has published the NHS priorities and operational planning guidance for 2025/26. It’s good to see that investment in mental health services is being maintained through the Mental Health Investment Standard (the MIS). There are a smaller number of national targets and a very clear message of the need to improve productivity. The national team have reviewed productivity in each mental health Trust, including length of stay of patients in inpatient settings, as well as community teams clinical patient facing time and corporate services. All these areas indicate we can become more productive. The good news is for us we are already working on these areas. The clear message from the Secretary of State and NHS England is that all Trusts must live within their means and the NHS needs to stop tolerating deficits. We are working on our Annual Plan to reflect these NHS priorities, and we have updated our twelve large scale change programmes for next years plan. These reflect the health inequalities challenge, and the need to maximise digital innovation. You can find these on our website here.
It was excellent to have so many clinicians and locality leaders taking part in our Getting it Right Frist Time (GIRFT) workshop on Friday 24 January at Hellesdon. I was so pleased to open the event, and to welcome Dr Ian Davidson to our Trust, the national GIRFT lead for crisis and acute mental health. We spent our time together focussing on patient flows through the crisis pathway and between our services, and how we can make sure people get the right treatment at the right time. I am really looking forward to seeing the benefits this work can bring to us, and how it can support us to be more productive in our daily work with service users and patients.
I was delighted to launch Wave 2 of our Listening into Action (LiA) initiative at Trinity Park, Ipswich on 11 February. This followed on from our ‘Pass it on Event’ at the end of 2024. This new event launched 18 new pioneer teams, each with their own innovative and transformational change programme. We brought together many colleagues from across the Trust for the day to plan how the mission for their pioneer team and what they will deliver in just 20 weeks. A key message from me was to keep this simple – the whole purpose of LiA is to cut out the bureaucracy, and use the talent across our organisation to make these changes quickly. It’s not a traditional approach, and that’s why it delivers! This is another vital part of our improvement work to develop the quality and productivity of our services.
Myself and our Chair Zoë Billingham and some Executives, with colleagues from our two Integrated Care Boards (ICBs) met with many of our Norfolk and Suffolk MPs in Westminster on 23 January. It is so important to hear feedback and share our progress with our MPs, so they can understand our plans. We will continue to meet them individually and meet them again in London in the summer, alongside arranging MP visits to some of our sites.
Locally, I was pleased to meet Nigel Parsley, the Senior Coroner for Suffolk, and Jacqueline Lake, Norfolk Senior Coroner, and Area Coroner Samantha Goward recently with Chief Medical Officer and Deputy CEO, Faisil Sethi, and Chief Nurse, Anthony Deery. It is really important to build relationships with our coroners and for them to understand our plans for improvement. A very high priority for us is to ensure we are learning and improving from deaths of people who have are in our services and be able to show how we have learnt and how services have improved before an inquest is held. We have much more to do here. We are also very aware of how intimidating it may feel for staff to attend an inquest and give evidence. We are planning to work with our coroners to enable staff to be familiar with a coroners court and have the right level of support to be able to present in a confident manner with high levels of sensitivity and compassion to families who have lost their loved one. Any thoughts or views you have on this would be very welcome.
Continuing on the theme of partnership, Faisil and I met the Suffolk Police and Crime Commissioner (PCC) Tim Passmore recently. The PCC sets the police and crime objectives for policy in Suffolk, and is a key partner for us to work with given the close relationship between mental health and policing. It was really positive to hear about the strong partnership working with the police.
We have just completed our Listening into Action (LiA) Pulse Check and Leadership Audit surveys. We will share the results soon and make sure these results are as credible and meaningful as possible.
I am really pleased to launch a new initiative called ‘Dear Caroline’ this week, designed to make sure your voices are heard in a safe and anonymous manner. At our Trust, I want each of you to feel valued, safe, and empowered to share your thoughts without fear of any negative implication for you personally.
I want people to be able to contribute their thoughts within mature team settings where we are all encouraged to contribute. Where colleagues feel they need to raise an issue of concern please go to your manager. If you do not feel able to do this please go the freedom to speak up guardian.
‘Dear Caroline’ is an additional way for you to give your thoughts or raise a concern if existing channels haven’t worked. It is completely anonymous if you want it to be. It is a secure platform where you can raise concerns or make suggestions about any issue related to the Trust. Whether it’s an idea for improvement or a matter of concern, ‘Dear Caroline’ provides you with a confidential space to share freely. It is really important that we share action taken as a result of people raising concerns and both freedom to speak up and Dear Caroline will start to do this in a much more open and transparent way so you will be able to see themes of concerns raised and action which has been taken. We will share what he hear anonymously.
Also do look out for our internal communications survey which launches this week – we want to hear your thoughts on how we can improve. We want to hear what works for you, and what we can do much better to make sure colleagues know what’s going on in our Trust, and that we hear your voice too. We will use what we hear to refresh and update our internal Trust communications.
Finally, looking ahead, I am delighted to announce NSFTs first Race Equity Conference on Monday 31 March in Suffolk – invitations have just gone out to all colleagues. This will be led by Yvonne Coghill, who has undertaken a detailed review of race across the Trust. This conference will enable us all consider how NSFT can become much more inclusive organisation and enable us to co-design the conference alongside our Race Equality and Cultural Heritage Network (REACH) network. There is much to do, and this work is absolutely vital, please do attend if at all possible – it is open to everyone across the Trust.
Until next time
Caroline