Improving Together – CEO Caroline Donovan’s Blog – 20 January 2025
Hi everyone
Welcome to my blog.
I want to start with a personal thank you from me for all the messages of congratulations and support that I have received since my substantive appointment as Chief Executive has been confirmed. We have much more to do together as we continue to improve, and I am looking forward to working with you all.
In the last two weeks, it has been exciting to welcome our five new locality directors and teams; some colleagues who are new to the Trust and some who have moved to a new role. The Executive team meet every month with our 15 locality leaders at our Trust Management Team (TMT) meeting, and there was a terrific energy in the room for our first meeting of 2025, now our five new localities are up and running. You can find out who everyone is on our website here. We will make our announcements about the phase 3 locality appointments very shortly.
I must mention the very challenging operational environment that the NHS finds itself in at the moment. It has been a tough few weeks. I want to thank everyone who has played a part in supporting the flow of patients through our inpatient beds, and helped to support our local acute Trusts who are also under pressure. Thandie Matambanadzo, our Chief Operating Officer (COO), and Andy Mack, our Deputy COO, are leading our work on flow, ensuring mental health is discussed at the daily system calls, so we can make sure we have the help we need to discharge service users when they are fit and ready.
I was so pleased that the first workshop of the two Integrated Care Boards in Norfolk and Suffolk (ICBs) alongside NSFT went so well last week. The workshop was independently facilitated and included the Executive teams across all three organisations and some mental health commissioners. We spent time exploring how we strengthen the partnership across all three organisations and include wider partners going forward. A key focus will be developing transformed mental health pathways and to deliver consistency and address the variation that currently exists. We have agreed to the principle of one contract and need to ensure that the collaboration opportunities result in improved care and service delivery. We can see the green shoots of progress already, with improving and above average performance on some of our waiting lists for adults and children, and our family and friends tests significantly improving. We are absolutely not complacent though, and whilst we are making progress, we must continue to do so together as a system, with humility. Our five new localities will really help to strengthen this as we all get to know our stakeholders better. The efficiency environment is so challenging, and this is both an opportunity and challenge as we develop our plans for this year and next. We can reduce waste and improve productivity and collaborate with partners as much as possible to deliver joined up services.
I am so delighted that this week marks the opening of the Rivers Centre with service users moving into the three new wards of our fantastic £55 million development on the Hellesdon site – Sandpiper, Kestrel and Mayfly. We held an informal open event for neighbours, experts by experience, governors and stakeholders last week with the opportunity to have a walk around Sandpiper - one of the three new wards. Everyone was blown away by the fantastic new, state of the art facility, which will help care for service users safely, in modern, bright purpose builds wards. It was also good to know that about 50 members of our staff visited the ward too ahead of them opening.
Staff who will be working in the three wards have spent time in them overnight in the last few days to test the wards, and I am so grateful for this – it will make sure a huge difference as service users are transferred in. I really want to thank everyone who has been involved in this huge project over the last four and a half years, especially Jason Hollidge, Matt Wilson (now in a new role in another Trust), Richard Chilcott, Mark Kittle, Zita Hipperson, Matthew Milne and Sophie Bagge – and many more I am sure. We also have some incredible art installations which have been co-designed with service users and we are grateful for Hospital Rooms for these – we are one of their largest ever projects! The impact of this artwork on the therapeutic environment will now form part of an international study, which is thrilling - I am grateful to the Norwich University of the Arts for their leadership of this. The results will inform how we design the environments for those in our care for the future.
I was so pleased to visit the Julian Hospital last week with Marie-Claire Delbrouque, our new Executive Director (NED). During our visit to Sandringham Ward, we met with the three matrons (Kirsty Robins, Aaron Baffoe and Mel Beales), ward manager Annah Mhlanga-Chirimuta, and staff grade doctor, Anjali Munagapati with foundation doctor, Shreya Chakraborty. Gillian Mutizwa, Associate Director of Nursing led the visit. It was so lovely to be so warmly welcomed, and for the team to have prepared a presentation for us, outlining what they were rightly very proud of as well as challenges they needed help with. Thank you so much.
Alongside some of the executive team and Jodie Butcher, Head of Participation, Involvement and Experience, I met with the Campaign to Save Mental Health Services across Norfolk and Suffolk last week and had a really helpful discussion about co-production. It was useful for us to explore what more we can do, particularly as we have invested as a Trust in significant leadership to lead our co-production work, building on some of the good work that has happened so far. Cath Byford starts in her new role as Chief Patient Experience Officer today and Nikant Ailawadi, Director of Patient Experience starts in a couple of months. Both will be working alongside Jodie in strengthening our work with people with lived experience. Working closely with our new localities, they will be supporting the establishment of five new locality service user and carer councils - such a fantastic opportunity to learn and improve.
Looking ahead, we continue to plan for a possible inspection of our services in 2025 by the Care Quality Commission (CQC). There is so much work underway to make sure the quality of our services is as high as it can be, and it is so positive that clinical and service leaders are leading their own service improvements at team level. I am very grateful to Lisa Quinn, our Quality Lead, for all her work in our services to make sure you are all well prepared. We have drop-in sessions starting this week with Lisa so do go along if you need to find out more. To help staff, we have produced a digital handbook which can be accessed through the intranet. It’s a really helpful reminder all in one place of our work in 2024, and our ambitions for the coming year.
In support of this work, please make sure you take time to do your appraisal and supervision meetings, both clinical and management, check your performance against clinical standards, completing your fire risk assessments, and so on.
We held a Listening into Action (LiA) wave 2 workshop for sponsors last week. It is really exciting that we are starting so many new pioneer teams – the sponsors will guide and support these teams, with a strong locality focus. We will officially launch these new teams on Tuesday 11 February in Ipswich.
Finally, today I launched our second Listening into Action Pulse Check. It is now a year since we launched LiA and this Pulse Check will help us understand if our staff feel that they can get involved in change and if things are starting to improve at NSFT. Staff who attended our LiA Pass it On event in November 2024 completed the Pulse Check and their results demonstrated a significant improvement on last year – I really hope our wider staff feel things are improving and can join the LiA approach.
Until next time,
Caroline