Sara's leadership blog for December 2024
Our Chief Exec Dr Sara Munro has penned her final leadership blog of 2024.
Hello,
I’ve just come out of our final Trust Board meeting of 2024 to write my final leadership blog of the year.
The Board was treated to a great presentation from the Leeds Recovery College – a small but mighty team within our Trust that delivers fantastic sessions on mental wellbeing.
They have a specific offer for staff working in health and care in Leeds. We heard a shocking statistic that at our Trust alone, mental ill health accounted for 38.5% of all absence over the last year. In terms of time lost, that adds up to £2.6million.
So the work they are doing to address and improve the mental wellbeing of staff is so vital. We also heard about one of the ways they’re doing it – running relaxation sessions using virtual reality headsets!
Board members were keen to try it out for themselves – especially when they heard about the positive impact it was having within our care services already.
Find out more about the Leeds Recovery College on their website.
Visits to services
It’s been a pleasure to spend time in some of our services over the last few weeks. These include:
- Our Young people’s inpatient service at Red Kite View,
- Our low secure forensic services at Clifton House in York, and
- Ward 6 at the Newsam Centre in Leeds which is home to our adult eating disorder inpatient unit.
I enjoyed spending time meeting with staff and service users and discussing the great work that is taking place. It’s also an opportunity for open and frank conversations about the tough challenges as well, which included the all too familiar struggles to recruit qualified mental health nurses and providing high quality care to patients with complex needs and challenging behaviours.
Other Board members have been visiting services as well – something that is always appreciated, as well as providing valuable insights for board members to inform our leadership and decision making.
Winter has arrived – and the five ways you can help
In case you needed reminding, winter landed in November. Our Chief Operating Officer Joanna is overseeing our arrangements to ensure we are ready for this perennially difficult time.
NHS England has set out their expectations on how mental health providers will work with system partners to support A&E and enable sufficient bed capacity to reduce delays in admissions. It is important to acknowledge this will be a challenging period for us. Whilst we have made great progress since April on improving patient flow, we have seen a plateau affect followed by a surge in demand for female beds.
The Executive Team is working closely with the patient flow team and our women’s service to explore all possible options to alleviate the current pressures and create further capacity for the coming weeks.
You can play your part by getting behind the Together We Can campaign, which is promoting these five key things we can all do to stay well over winter:
- Keep warm,
- Wash hands,
- Check in on each other,
- Get vaccinated, and
- Choose the right service when you need help – such as NHS111.
Find out more about the five ways to keep well this winter on the West Yorkshire Health and Care Partnership’s website.
Adult ADHD developments
We took the difficult decision to temporarily suspend non-urgent referrals into our Adult ADHD Service in October. This decision was not taken lightly and followed months of consideration across the local health system.
The situation had become unsustainable with over 4,500 people on our waiting list which continued to grow way beyond what we could possibly manage. This meant that people would potentially wait over 10 years to be seen. It was unethical to continue to hold this position so we had to take some drastic action.
That action includes working with the Leeds GP Confederation to improve the scale and design of the care pathway to make it sustainable and fit for the future.
To support people currently on the waiting list, we have worked with the GP Confed to put in place a ‘support and navigation’ offer. These ‘navigators’ will be helping patients make informed choices, including exploring their options under the NHS Right to Choose Framework.
Some big national announcements
Since my last blog there have been a few big announcements.
Firstly, the budget on 30 October made several spending commitments relevant to the NHS. At the time of writing, we are awaiting further detail from the Department of Health and Social Care about how the allocation for the NHS will be distributed and what this means for the operational priorities for 2025/26.
On 13 November the Secretary of State for Health made announcements about the expectations of the NHS following the budget, which generated some attention-grabbing headlines. The proposals were more wide ranging than what you might have read in the news.
They included change to the NHS operating model and oversight framework, through to shifting approaches to accountability and responsibility at Trust, Integrated Care Board and NHS England levels. This included the (re)introduction of performance league tables and individual organisational accountability for financial and operational performance.
We’ve heard that Trusts that perform well may get greater autonomy and freedoms – for example on how they use the cash and capital funding. This is an old New Labour policy which we saw with the creation of foundation trusts around 20 years ago.
The Chief Exec of NHS England, Amanda Pritchard, has also set out her five expectations for Trusts and health systems:
- Live within your means and the budget you have been allocated,
- Embed improvement in clinical efficiency and productivity,
- Maintain quality and safety of services,
- Work together to lay the foundations for neighbourhood care, and
- Maxmisie and stretch the opportunities where improvements and investment have already been made, with a particular emphasis on the benefits of technology to productivity and efficiency.
We are expecting further detail to be shared over the coming weeks, to be included in the operating guidance for 2025/26 which is due to be published in December.
Reasons to be Proud
We won Project of the Year (Public Sector) at the 2024 Document Manager Awards – so it’s a big well done to our Head of Information Governance Carl Starbuck who led the project at the Trust.
Jake’s eating disorder recovery journey was shortlisted for Best Documentary Style Video in the 2024 Lens Awards. Jake received treatment with our CONNECT eating disorders service who gave up their time and supported the production of the film. Watch this powerful short story below . . .
We celebrated Nursing Support Worker’s Day on 23 November by sharing Ozioma’s story who works in our Older People’s Inpatient Service at The Mount. Nursing support workers have a critical role to play in delivering high quality care and excellent outcomes for patients. However their vital contribution can often go unnoticed, and their value underestimated which is why I’m proud shine a light on it.
A delegation from the University of Pretoria in South Africa visited the Newsam Centre in October to find out more about our Volunteer Sports Project – a partnership between our Trust Voluntary Services and the University of Leeds. The sports project has been running since 2019, with students from the University giving their time to deliver sports activities to our service users.
Anna’s maternal boost
Kudos to Anna Selassie (pictured) who, over the past two years, has led a pilot project to develop a Maternal Mental Health Service, addressing a gap in care for women with severe anxiety about childbirth or post-traumatic stress disorder from traumatic births.
She has provided evidence-based cognitive behavioural therapy and collaborated closely with maternity services to ensure timely, specialist support for these women.
Anna’s work has directly informed the development of ‘Paths’ – a new regional Maternal Mental Health Service hosted by colleagues in South West Yorkshire Partnership NHS Foundation Trust, which launched in July 2024 and will directly benefit this population of women in Leeds.
October’s Team of the Month – our West Hub Primary Care Mental Health Team
Well done to this team who stress the importance of wellbeing and partnership working. They have worked together to support each other and our service users during the horrific incidents of the riots earlier this year.
The judges noted that the team are incredibly caring, always going above and beyond supporting colleagues and staff alike.
Staffnet – you are GOLD!
Our staff intranet was named as a gold winner at the MarCom Awards 2024. The new staff intranet, named Staffnet 365, was launched in March and was a collaborative project between our Communications Team, Informatics Team and our supplier Intelligent Decisioning.