Sue's Post Board Blog - July 2018
This month our Chair, Professor Sue Proctor, reflects on the Trust’s “cultural competency”, how the new NHS pay deal has been communicated, patient flow and partnerships.
Welcome to my blog following the July meeting of the Trust’s Board of Directors.
This has been a remarkable summer with weeks of sunshine in the current heatwave. Whilst this weather can be enjoyable for lots of people, especially those taking their annual leave, for many of our staff and service users, this can be a difficult time. I know we’re doing all we can to keep our most vulnerable service users safe as well as making our working environments as tolerable as possible.
Thank you to staff for all you are doing to help keep our services going and meeting the needs of those who use them during this heatwave.
Cultural competency – ethnicity matters
At the Board meeting, we heard an excellent presentation from Saeideh Saeidi, our Head of Clinical Audit and Service Evaluation, for our Sharing Stories segment. Saeideh has won a grant from the Mary Seacole programme to conduct a project called “Ethnicity Matters: Cultural Competence in Mental Healthcare” and spoke to us about this work.
The aim of her research is to assess the Trust’s cross-cultural strengths and weaknesses and, from that, form an action plan to promote what she calls “greater cultural competence” across the organisation.
She talked us through some of the issues she’s looking into, including the disproportionate number of black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME) people being detained, medicated or placed on a community treatment order; and issues within the BAME workforce around progression, promotion, training and disciplinary procedures.
This is an important issue across the NHS as much as it for our Trust and clearly requires attention and solutions. A lot of the work lies within community relations and work at primary care level. So it was encouraging to hear this was already being looked at in Leeds in work by our by third sector partner Touchstone.
Saeideh’s presentation generated a lot of discussion and some suggestions for action. We look forward to reading her report when it is published in the autumn.
I was reminded of recent comments made at the NHS Confederation Conference about the NHS’ “diversity dividend”. Achieving greater diversity among our workforce should not be seen as a problem we have to solve, but we should invest in ensuring there is greater representation in the NHS workforce and, in particular, in leadership roles, which will in turn lead to a better service for patients.
NHS pay deal – question from the floor sparks debate
The board was challenged to respond to a question from a staff member about how the recently-announced NHS pay deal had been communicated to staff. This was very timely and echoed a number of concerns that had recently been raised through our Joint Negotiating and Consultative Committee (JNCC) as well as through our HR and payroll departments.
Our Interim Director of Workforce Lindsay Jensen responded, saying the initial national announcement had concentrated on this being a “pay increase” for staff, particularly those on lower grades. However, we need to understand this covers a lot more than just pay and includes changes to terms and conditions as well as how pay progression will work from April 2019.
Lindsay will continue to work with her HR colleagues and our Communications Team to roll out responsible and reliable information to staff as it becomes available, and ensure that our staff have a way of getting their questions answered.
In the meantime, we are asking all colleagues to visit the NHS Employers resources to help you understand your pay website as the best place to help staff understand how these changes affect them.
Leeds-wide work to improve patient flow
There has been a lot of work going on in the last three months to look at patient flow from inpatient settings in our trust and from Leeds Teaching Hospitals. This is referred to in both our Chief Executive’s and Chief Operating Officer’s board papers. The lengths of delays patients can experience in their discharge from inpatient care due to the time it takes to agree the funding of an appropriate care package are of real concern and have been discussed by the Board on a number of occasions.
We were therefore pleased to hear that our Chief Exec Sara Munro will be taking a lead on challenging health care leaders across the city on tackling the persistent factors that block patients’ discharge from hospital to a more appropriate care setting.
You can read more about the range of work that’s been going on to improve patient flow in our Chief Operating Officer’s paper, but in short, in includes:
- work to reduce the number of out of area placements
- Analysis work on whether we have enough beds, staffed in the right way and in the right place; and
- The system wide work focusing on delayed transfers of care
Partnerships
We often talk about partnership working so it was helpful to hear about a piece of work to map our partners in the third sector across Leeds detailed in our Chief Operating Officer’s report (item 11 page 54).
We regularly work with 293 organisations across the city, and of those, we have formal contracts with eight worth around £1.3 million.
The need to improve the way we work with these partners was highlighted through the Community Mental Health Redesign. As a result we’re looking to establish a partnership forum alongside Leeds’ third sector umbrella group Forum Central.
Other Board business
The Board discussed a range of other matters at our meeting, and papers on the various topics are available on our website.
The Board doesn’t meet formally in August, so our next formal Board meeting will be at the end of September. In the meantime, I’m looking forward to our Annual Members’ Meeting on 31 July and a joint development meeting with our Council of Governors on 5 September. In addition, our senior leaders are holding listening events with staff at many sites across the Trust.
With best wishes for a lovely summer, and if you’re going on leave, hoping you have a relaxing and refreshing break.
Sue
Find out more about our Chair Professor Sue Proctor.