Post Board Blog February 2019

We’ve changed the way we’re doing Board meetings. Find out more in this month’s Post Board Blog from Professor Sue Proctor plus a very uplifting service user story from our National Inpatient Centre for Psychological Medicine, gains in staff survey results, praise for learning disability services and a quick round up of the rest of February’s Board discussions.

Welcome to my latest Post Board Blog following our meeting on 28 February 2019, and I start by letting you know that we’re now doing things a bit differently with our Board meetings.

February’s Public Board meeting was the first of a new lighter style approach we’re taking. From now on, we’ll be rotating our Board meetings between fuller public meetings, like the one we had in January, and lighter meetings, like February’s. There are two main reasons for this.

Firstly, producing all our reports monthly wasn’t working as smartly as we needed it to, as colleagues need more time to do the work to make an impact on the challenges and actions we’re setting them. Therefore, producing reports once every two months will allow those colleagues to spend more time doing the work rather than writing reports.

Secondly, it’s become clear that we, as a Trust Board, need more time together to consider complex and difficult issues, and we need to spend more time looking forward rather than poring over what’s happened. Therefore, when we have lighter public board meetings, we’ll be spending the remaining time in development sessions, looking at things like the forthcoming changes to mental health legislation, like we did last week.

We’ll continue to publish our papers and board meeting schedule on our website and promote them via our social media channels so you can keep up to date with our business and when our different meetings are taking place. We’ll review this way of rotating our board meetings in September to see how it’s working.

 

Sharing service user stories – Natalka’s journey ends in nuptials

One thing we’ll continue to do is have a patient or carer story at the beginning of every Board meeting. This is really important as it keeps our executives and non-executives in touch with how their work impacts on the people who come into contact with services.

We were treated to a very uplifting account from a young woman called Natalka. She described how she’d spent over 10 years with a range of symptoms that couldn’t be explained or treated effectively. She had attempted suicide and couldn’t see a better future for herself, until she was referred into our National Inpatient Centre for Psychological Medicine .

Natalka spoke very highly of Dr Peter Trigwell, or “Triggers” as she affectionately dubbed him, and his team at the NICPM, and how she was “overwhelmed” by their expertise and knowledge.

She described how she’d been bed ridden and house bound for over a decade, but thanks to the great care from the whole team at the NICPM, she recovered and came out a different person which was “beyond her wildest dreams”. In fact, she told us she’d just recently got married, after putting this on hold in 2010.

The NICPM is an eight bedded highly specialist unit that takes patients from across the country. They often help people with medically unexplained symptoms. Natalka was concerned that this kind of expertise should be available more locally to people, and that only having one unit puts a lot of pressure on patients and carers who come from across the country.

Our Chief Exec Sara Munro responded to this point in that we are in conversation with NHS England about how we can improve access and share expertise across the country to reduce problems with funding places and access.

I’m delighted that Natalka has agreed to work with our patient experience team and become one of our service user representatives. I also hope she’ll share her story more widely as it’s such a great testament to the often unseen work that goes on in services like the NICPM.


Staff survey – we’re making gains

Some of our staff at St Mary's Hospital

Sara Munro gave us a quick verbal report on the recently published staff survey results, and we are making some fairly significant ‘incremental gains’ as she put it.

Over 80 per cent of Trust staff reported feeling happy with the quality of care they provide and 87 per cent feel their role makes a difference. Sara picked out positive results in staff engagement and safety culture, where we are performing better than similar organisations across the country.

Sara highlighted staff health and wellbeing and creating a culture of fairness, particularly for Black and Minority Ethnic staff, as areas for improvement and, as reported in her January blog she is committed to leading a focused piece of work around culture.

 

Learning disability service receives praise

Our Non-executive Director John Baker praised the work of Clinical Lead Lyndsey Charles who had recently presented the Annual Quality and Safety Report for the Learning Disability Service to the Trust’s Quality Committee.

The report gave the Committee an insight into this complex and varied service, and how it plans to develop and improve. For example, one of their key goals is to increase meaningful service user and carer involvement.

John cited the “phenomenal” work of many of the junior learning disabilities staff that he’d seen on a recent visit, saying they displayed an exceptional variety of skills and abilities. He asked if the Trust could do more to enhance the career options for learning disability nurses and support workers to bring them into parity with other professions.

 

Quick verbal highlights  

We submitted a draft operational plan to NHS England / Improvement on 12 February. This covers the next 12 months, after which we’ll be required to produce a three year plan that dovetails with the NHS’ Long Term Plan. The Board heard that the Trust is taking part in system-wide meetings with the aim of aligning our plans at city and regional level with our partners.

With only a month to go before financial year end we’re on target to meet our control total – which is a financial surplus that we’re asked to contribute to the wider health system.

We are still expecting the Care Quality Commission (CQC) to return soon for our second ‘well-led inspection’ since the last one at the beginning of 2018 – see report published April 2018. We had expected this to take place in May but no word yet so watch this space.

Our Chief Operating Officer Joanna Forster Adams reported improvements in our out of area placements during January and February. She praised the work of our Out of Area Placement Co-ordinator in helping to reduce out of area length of stays and improving patient flow. We look forward to seeing a fuller report on this at the March Board.

 


Find out more about Professor Sue Proctor