Sue's Post Board Blog - September 2018
This month our Chair, Professor Sue Proctor, reflects on how the Trust supports its workforce’s health and wellbeing, our record number of staff nominations for the Trust Awards and recruitment figures for specialist mental health services.
Hello again. Here are my reflections on this month’s Board of Directors Meeting – you can find the papers on our website. This month it was a very people-centred meeting and I welcome that.
Again we began with a personal story. It takes courage to address a big meeting full of strangers and particularly so this time because we heard from a member of our staff who has what we call ‘lived experience’. She spoke candidly about the causes of the mental ill health which almost drove her to take her own life; then described how the help she had received from the professionals at our Trust had aided her recovery. But as the result of what she felt was poor management and communication, she was plunged back into despair by a service restructure. Skilled clinicians have again helped her to recover and come back to work. Judging by the comments from my colleagues I was not alone in feeling the power of this testimony.
We do many things to support our workforce’s health and wellbeing but we need to be absolutely sure that we can give people who are in recovery the support they need to stay well; particularly at times of change, which most of us find unsettling. I know the managers leading the redesign of our Community Health Services have put a lot of time and effort into engaging our workforce and taking people on a ‘no surprises’ journey so that the changes don’t feel so worrying.
Sometimes it’s difficult to recruit to specialist mental health services so it was great to learn that we have successfully appointed 36 new Registered Nurses and 15 new nursing support posts to meet recognised safe staffing levels and reduce our reliance on expensive agency staff.
The Board heard that yet more staff have been nominated for national awards and we hope to hear about winners next month! We’ve also had a record number of nominations for our own internal staff awards. This says a great deal about our internal culture and I was really genuinely glad to see so many clinicians being recognised by the people who work with them.
More good news – we have reached the national our target for the number of people trained to recognise vulnerable people at risk of radicalisation through the counter terrorism Prevent scheme. This has been a really swift turn round and the Board thanked everyone who worked so hard to make this happen. We also learned that our crisis service picks up 80% of calls within one minute, but pushing this response rate higher will need investment in better technology.
And the final highlight from a packed agenda was signing of a Memorandum of Understanding which set out the basis for working in partnership with all the health and social care organisations across West Yorkshire and Harrogate. Working at scale like this is complex, but I am convinced it will quickly bring health benefits for everyone.
As always, please get in touch if you have any questions or comments about the Trust and our work. We’ll be meeting again at the end of October at Horizon Leeds in the heart of the city. You can come and see us in action and send in questions before the meeting – but please be aware that these are meetings in public, not public meetings where you can ask questions from the floor.
Until next time, please take care