Improving Together – CEO Caroline Donovan’s Blog – 6 January 2025
Hi everyone
Welcome to my first blog of 2025, and to my first as your substantive Chief Executive.
I hope that you had some time to rest and recharge over the festive and New Year break, and to spend time with those close to you. A very special thank you from me to everyone who worked over the festive period to support our service users, carers and families.
I was delighted to accept the role of Chief Executive at NSFT. Whilst last year was fairly challenging, it has been an absolute privilege to lead NSFT. I am excited about working with such great people and continuing our improvement journey, making sure that our service users, carers and families are at the very heart of everything we do, every day. Many of you who have worked with me over the last year will know that building trust and demonstrating humility is absolutely essential to our success.
During 2024, we worked hard to build foundations for our future, and started to deliver sustained recovery and improvement. As we begin 2025, you should all feel proud – each one of you has played a part in making this happen. You have embraced the challenge and begun to transform services.
We set out our improvement plan in 2024 with 12 large scale improvement programmes and we have achieved so much.
Improving Health
- Strategy
We have developed a new five-year strategy with four strategic priorities; Improving Health, Improving Care, Improving Culture and Improving Value and a suite of enabling strategies.
- Learning from deaths
We have reviewed more than 12,000 deaths and now have a credible mortality reporting system, but there is still much more to do to demonstrate we can learn from incidents.
- Clinical transformation
We have appointed Stewart Gee as our new Chief Transformation Officer and established a new Transformation directorate. We have identified four priorities: crisis services; community mental health services; children and young people’s services and inpatient mental health services. We have completed a deep dive into our crisis/111 and community mental health services. We have significantly reduced waiting times in our children and young people’s services and our adult community mental health services.
Improving Care
- Leadership structure
We have completed a significant review and implementation of our clinical services, delivery structures and leadership roles. We have moved to five locality structures with consistency of clinical service groupings and leadership roles. We have significantly increased our clinical leadership roles.
- Improving quality
We have completed 100% of our CQC ‘must do’ actions and completed a detailed assessment of all our CQC registered services. We have merged our mortality and patient safety teams and appointed to new senior leadership roles for safer care and quality.
- Service users, carers and families
We have established a new Service User and Carer Council and plan to develop five locality councils. We have created and appointed Cath Byford into a new Chief Patient Experience role and Nikant Ailawadi into a new Director of Patient Experience role.
Improving Culture
- Listening into Action
We have appointed Priscilla Nzounhenda as our Listening into Action lead and completed Wave 1 of our Listening into Action Programme with 27 teams leading significant improvement. Staff engagement is showing some green shoots of improvement.
- Being open and transparent
We have strengthened our communications approach with the appointment of Rebecca Driver as our Director of Communications and Engagement. We have a renewed commitment to partnership working and being open and transparent. We have worked closely with our health overview and scrutiny committees. We have appointed a new Freedom to Speak Up guardian Holly Stephens.
- Inclusion
We have established a new CEO led Inclusion Council and commissioned an external review of race equality, completed by Yvonne Coghill. We have reviewed priorities and strengthened our commitment to our staff networks.
Improving Value
- EVI (Efficiency, Value and Improvement) programme
We have developed a comprehensive EVI programme integrated with our clinical transformation programme and are on track to deliver our efficiency plans by the end of March.
- Governance
We have completed an external review of clinical and corporate governance and are on track to deliver the related improvement plan. We have established a new Corporate Affairs directorate and invested in strengthened risk and governance leadership. We have appointed Adewale Kadiri as our new Director of Governance.
- Electronic Patient Record (EPR)
We have launched a procurement process for our new Electronic Patient Record (EPR). This significant programme will replace our current system, Lorenzo, with a more advanced and efficient solution that will enhance our ability to deliver safer, kinder, and better care.
There truly is so much that has been achieved by everyone last year and so much to feel optimistic about in 2025.
We can see the impact on service users already, with more positive comments about our services, with waits coming down and our performance when compared to other mental health trusts in England is improving. We do, however, have examples of care that is not consistently of a high standard. We have so much more to do. Our challenge now is to maintain the pace of improvement.
I am so delighted that our five new localities go live this week. We still have more roles to appoint to, but we have mitigation plans in place and I am very grateful for the flexibility of our talented teams and individuals in supporting each other through the significant change process. Many people will be starting in new roles and we need to expect a period of uncertainty whilst we all settle into a new way of working.
There is no doubt that the year ahead will be tough for the NHS, particularly around finances. Whilst the pledge we heard just ahead of Christmas from the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care to keep the mental health investment standard in place - which protects spending on mental health care - the funding pressures we face will feel very real.
We are also planning for a possible inspection of our services in 2025 by the Care Quality Commission (CQC). Look out for our new digital handbook to help you prepare, which will be published this week. Thank-you to everyone who has contributed to this. This will help you really focus on improving quality and safety. It’s a really helpful reminder all in one place of our work in 2024, and our ambitions for the coming year.
Finally, looking ahead, there is a high level of anticipation as we prepare to see our first patients being cared for in the new Rivers Centre at Hellesdon from 20 January. I know that this has been a huge amount of work for many, over several years.
I am pleased we will be able to offer staff the opportunity to visit ahead of patients and staff moving in. Staff can read more about this on our intranet.
Until next time,
Caroline