Sue's post-Board blog - September

A blog from our Chair, Professor Sue Proctor, following the September Trust Board meeting

Hello, my name is Sue, and welcome to my latest post-Board blog following the meeting of our Board of Directors on Wednesday 28 September.

The Board discussed a range of important matters concerning the Trust’s services and you can find the papers that informed these discussions on our website.

Sharing Stories
We begin each Board meeting with a ‘sharing stories’ session, where we hear about one of our services either from a service user or carer, or from a staff team. This month our Voluntary Services team presented a short video about the work our 129 active volunteers do across the Trust to help people to achieve their goals. Volunteer Annie, pictured left, spoke passionately about her own experiences and described how she had been so inspired by her work with the Assertive Outreach Team that she now intends to train as a mental health nurse. She described her involvement with the Trust as ‘life changing’, and we were grateful that Annie felt able to share her very personal story with us.

These sessions are really important as they allow the Board to hear where things are going well and where things need to improve. Such feedback is vital for us to be able to continually improve our services and that is exactly why we made it the main focus of our Annual Member’s Meeting earlier this month. This year’s event involved an interactive session with our service users, carers, members, staff and third sector partners, where we explored how we can listen and respond better to feedback. There’s more information about this on our news pages. I’m really keen that this work remains a priority, and is ultimately embedded into our Quality Plan – one of our core strategies.

Winter is coming
We received a paper outlining the preparations we are making both internally, and as a key partner in the Leeds health care system, in preparation for this winter. We traditionally see a surge in demand for health services during the winter months and it was reassuring to hear that robust plans are in place to address the risks and minimise the impact that events such as adverse weather, staff unavailability and flu can have on our services. As ever, collaboration is key, and we are working with our health, social care and third sector partners to ensure that we, as a city, are prepared for the inevitable challenges of the colder months.

Our own flu fighter campaign begins next week, and we’ll be encouraging all our staff to protect themselves, their families and their service users by getting their flu jab. These will be available at a number of drop-in clinics and walk-around sessions and from peer-to-peer vaccinators from Monday 2 October.

Learning
Our Medical Director, Dr Claire Kenwood, presented a paper (item 10) that describes how we learn from avoidable deaths in care. It’s an important paper for clinicians which reflects a significant amount of work by the Mortality Review group over recent months. The group’s philosophy is one of continual learning, and that this learning be integrated with other Trust processes and shared with other trusts to improve care for our service users.
The Trust will be represented at a Royal College of Psychiatrists group set up specifically to support a national process for mental health mortality reviews and we look forward to feeding in to this work.

New faces
The workforce report brought some positive news about the impact of our recruitment drive over the summer. We successfully appointed to 25 nursing posts across our specialist services, community and crisis assessment teams and the learning disability services filled vacancies in both their community and inpatient teams. On top of this, 44 student nurses will join the Trust over the coming weeks, and I’m sure colleagues will join me in extending a very warm welcome to all of our new recruits.

CQC Action Plan
In the reports we received in 2016, the Care Quality Commission (CQC) rated 77% of our services as good or outstanding but rated the Trust overall as ‘requires improvement’. Since then, a great deal of attention has been given to improving our position and demonstrating the standards of our services. We were delighted to hear that all of the 31 compliance actions on our Action Plan have now been completed and a number of ongoing assurance mechanisms are in place. The emphasis now must be on embedding these improvements in a sustainable way and ensuring that we are all working towards CQC safe standards in all that we do.

The CQC has recently changed the way it scrutinises care services, and although we won’t now know when to expect our next inspection, we’ve put a number of things in place including regular quality reviews to ensure we are well prepared for any unannounced clinical assessments.

The CQC update was presented by Anthony Deery, and represented his last contribution to the Board as Director or Nursing, Quality and Professions before he takes on a new role with NHS England and NHS Improvement, working across the North of England on the mental health Five Year Forward View.

Anthony truly embodies our values of integrity, simplicity and caring, and has made a fantastic contribution to the Trust since he joined us in 2014. I’d like to thank him, on behalf of the Board, for his hard work and commitment over the last three years, and to wish him every success for the future.