Chairs Blog from Trust Board meeting on Thursday 1 October 2026
Welcome to my blog.
I write my blog after every Trust Board meeting in public now, so I share six blogs a year. This means you can hear direct from me about what we talked about at our 1 October Board meeting. The Board leads the Trust, monitoring performance to deliver high-quality, safe care, and careful management of risks. It’s at the Board that we rightly deliver our accountability to the public we serve.
Along with my blog about our discussions at our Board meeting on 1 October, I’m also sharing a copy of my Chair report and the report from Caroline Donovan our Chief Executive. You can read these reports here. They give you much more detail about what we’ve been working on over the last couple of months.
You can watch our last Board meeting through this recording we share online.
I want to start my blog as always with our monthly TALK Awards for colleagues. We love to publicly congratulating our colleagues as we welcome our TALK awards winners and runners up to our Board meetings. Huge congratulations to our winner for July, Kirk Wilson, our Trust Family Liaison Officer, and to our July runner up, Trudi McManus, Senior Team Administrator in City Anchorage team based at the Julian hospital. Well done to both of you and thank you for all you do for the people we serve.
Our Board colleague and family experience story welcomed Prince Desmond Anyomi, Charge Nurse and heard about his experience through our Routes to Success Programme. We heard about the impact of racism on colleagues and families both working in and being cared for in our Trust. A family carer (who chose to remain anonymous) shared their story about the racism they experienced with the care of their son. They asked our Trust to find ways to treat black and minority ethnic service users better and to strengthen our approach racially trauma informed care. Thank you to you all for being brave and sharing your stories. Myself and our Board continue to be completely committed to becoming an anti-racist organisation - We have a race equity group chaired by our Caroline our Chief Executive which oversees the patient and carer race equality plan we have developed. Whilst we are strengthening our approach we know we must do more to hear the voice of our service users, carers and communities in this work.
Continuing our crucial work on racism and equity, Neil Lad, Associate Director of Education and Professional Development, and Holly Stephens, Head of Speaking Up, joined us, and we approved our new Anti-Racism Charter. Our Board heard about our Trust’s anti-racism journey. The new Charter is all about how we recognise, respond and actively address racism, enabling us to proactively become and anti-racist organisation. As a Board we are committed to naming racism and to acting. It was a huge step at Board to bring all this work to life through this Charter. The real test for us as a Board now will be whether colleagues and families feel safe to speak up and that we see real change.
Our Chair and Chief Executive reports reflected our progress and hard work across our Trust. We both acknowledged our fantastic recent ‘pass it on’ event with over 850 colleagues now involved in our Listening into Action (LiA) programmes. I acknowledged the work of our Non-Executive Directors and Executive Directors in getting out and about to visit our services to meet people and hear their view, and to our Governors who also do this. This is essential work to always hold our Board to account. It was also so pleased to note our progress moving to national oversight framework 3 which reflects the hard work of all our teams. Caroline confirmed the launch of our transforming Communities Programme (TCP) which supports bringing person centred care closer to home in our neighbourhoods. I am looking forward to seeing how this important work develops. As an improving Trust we have so much transformation work underway which is vital to develop high quality services.
As for the rest of our Board agenda for a meeting in public, it’s always quite full, and it’s impossible to mention it all in my blog, so I have set out my important highlights which I hope you find interesting.
The Board was concerned to hear about our rising sickness absence rates - we had a wide - ranging conversation about the work we are doing to address this, and I am grateful to our people and culture committee for their work on this. We agreed as a Board to focus on this at our next Board strategy day. As a Board, supporting colleagues to be well at work is the responsibility of all of us.
Tahlia Langstone, Co-Chair of our Service User and Carer Council, who has a seat at the table of every Board meeting, reported the great progress being made with our five locality councils where those with lived experience work together to influence Trust services, in genuine partnership. I was encouraged to hear about their focussed work on responding to complaints quickly and with compassion, which I have a particular interest in.
I gives me huge pleasure to end my blog with a focus on our latest Care Quality Commission (CQC) report published just last week. Our older people’s community teams have just received an overall rating of ‘good’ for their latest CQC report. The report and comments from the CQC included outstanding areas of performance. The Board heard the voices of service users and carers sharing how good the care they received was, helping them to stop feeling frightened, reassuring them, which was powerful to hear. It was a pleasure to welcome Rebecca Poz, Russ Cameron, Mel D’Ardis and Magda Turczyn from our older peoples teams to our Board to celebrate their success. The team told us that this report validates their years of hard work to combat ageism in society which the teams are all committed to. As a Board, we are committed to always noticing the older people we serve.
This was another very inspiring team for the Board to meet! We now have good ratings for eight out of eleven of our services that are inspected by the CQC - only two await new inspections with our children and young people’s community services recently inspected.
Thank you for taking time to read my blog - look out for my next one from our Board meeting on 3 December 2026.
Zoë
Zoë Billingham, Chair