Sara's blog - February 2018
Sara Munro's February blog looks forward to the NHS’ 70th birthday, feeds back on the recent CQC inspection and hails the arrival of the Leeds Health and Care Academy – the first of its kind in the country.
Celebrating 70 years of the NHS
Plans to celebrate the NHS’ 70th birthday are already well under way within the Trust.
Over the last 70 years, the NHS has transformed the health and well-being of the nation and become the envy of the world. The advancements that have taken place within mental health and learning disability services alone are staggering when you stop and think where we’ve come from and where we are now.
The big birthday takes place on Thursday 5 July and we’ve got a few ideas already on how we can celebrate our past, look forward to our future and pay tribute to the tremendous dedication of staff. There’s an entire weekend of celebration dedicated to mental health and learning disabilities being organised by colleagues at Leeds City Museum on 14 and 15 July. More details will be coming out soon but for now please save the dates.
CQC Inspection update
We finished our well-led inspection at the end of January following several months of document reviews, focus groups, interviews and service visits.
During my interview with the inspection team, I gave as full and honest an account of our Trust as I could. Here are the presentation slides if you want to take a look.
I’d like to thank all staff for their welcoming attitude, commitment and flexibility around this inspection process. This came through loud and clear when we received feedback from the CQC on the final inspection day.
The feedback also recognised the work we’ve done on improving our culture and values, strengthening leadership, board to floor connectivity, physical health and Mental Health Act governance. Areas for improvement included service user engagement and completing the work on our strategies so we can implement them.
We now expect our draft CQC reports in mid-March and final reports and ratings are due out in April.
Improving care across West Yorkshire and Harrogate
Progress on work to improve the health and care of the 2.6million people across West Yorkshire and Harrogate has been published in Our Next Steps to Better Health and Care for Everyone.
It’s being led by the West Yorkshire and Harrogate Health and Care Partnership, which includes eleven clinical commissioning, eight local councils and services provided by a number of health and social care organisations, including us. We’re working together on nine priority programmes which includes a number of mental health initiatives such as:
- the £13m capital investment to build a new children and young people mental health unit in Leeds
- the West Yorkshire suicide prevention plan
- new ways of working to support children and young people with complex mental health illness, including safer spaces for young people in crisis
- preventing out of areas placements
- investment to improve mental health liaison services in hospital
- new models of care around eating disorders and child and adolescent mental health services (CAMHS) pathways
- safer spaces and crisis cafés across West Yorkshire
Read the progress report online and find different formats such as easy-read, audio, animation, summary and BSL version.
Health and Care Academy – a first for Leeds
There’s an exciting development taking place in Leeds where the NHS, the local authority and the universities are joining forces to launch the Leeds Health and Care Academy. This is a first such academy in the country and will bring together all the talents of our learning and development colleagues to offer the best possible education and training for our workforce.
The Leeds Health and Care Academy is part of the Leeds Academic Health Partnership, which brings together leading expertise from three of the city’s universities, NHS organisations and Leeds City Council. The Partnership, one of the biggest of its kind in the UK, identifies, attracts and implements innovation and inward investment that responds to the challenges facing health and care, including reducing health inequalities across the city.
The Leeds Health and Care Academy is initially set to go live in April and be more firmly established by autumn 2018. We hope to hear more about it at our Trust Board meeting in March.
REASONS TO BE PROUD
Our workforce race equality champions
Two of our staff have been awarded places on NHS England’s Workforce Race Equality Standard (WRES) Expert Development Programme – a new national programme to improve equality and inclusion in the workplace. Ruby Bansel, Diversity and Inclusion Project Manager, and Wendy Tangen, a Ward Manager from our Forensics Service, already do a great deal in this area so this is an excellent opportunity for them personally and as well as for us. Well done to you both.