Chair's Blog from Trust Board meeting on Thursday 5 February 2026
Welcome to my first blog of 2026.
I write my blog after every Trust Board meeting in public, so I'll be sharing six blogs in 2026. This means you can hear direct from me about what we talk about at our Board meetings. As a reminder, 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 5 February, I'm also sharing a copy of my Chair report and the report from Caroline Donovan our Chief Executive. You can read these reports. They'll give you much more detail about what we've been working on over the last couple of months.
Our Board meeting is always live streamed to make sure everything we talk about is totally transparent to anyone who wants to watch live or watch later through the recording which we share online.
We focussed at our Board this month on the CQC report into our forensic and secure services. We welcomed Sandra Bekoe Clinical Team Leader on Drayton ward, Vickram Lutchmeah, Modern Matron and Tracey Holland, Director of Nursing to our Board meeting to share our service user story for our forensic secure services at Northside House.
We all share so much pride in these services which achieved a CQC rating of 'good', with two domains rated as 'outstanding', in December 2025. The service has also recently achieved national accreditation from the Royal College of Psychiatrists for two of our wards, just the third and fourth wards to be accredited in the whole country. It was so inspiring to showcase some of the activities our service users benefit from every day at Northside House, particularly in The Mount as part of their therapeutic care. I was very pleased to hear that we have responded to two asks from service users, securing a laptop for The Mount to help them sell more of the marvellous sculptures and furniture made there, and getting the generator repaired.
The strength of evidence and rigour applied by the teams across these services to secure these national accolades is a real testament to colleagues commitment and care, and to the engagement of service users and carers. These services are a beacon of excellence in NSFT and I am looking forward to seeing how we can share this teams learning more widely across our services.
This year, my focus as Chair continues to be on my three personal priorities:
- Advancing race equity across the Trust
- Placing carers at the centre of all we do - and it's so fantastic that we now have five new locality Service User and Carers Councils set up and running - great progress!
- Championing innovation on improvement across all our services
On our race and equity work, I want to sincerely thank Harprit Hockley, Director of Culture and Organisational Development, ahead of her departure from the Trust in March. Harprit has championed equity and particularly race equity across all our services during her time here. I feel we are moving ahead with focus and determination now, and whilst I was pleased to have an update at Board I will continue to push on rapid progress and improvement on race.
It has been an extraordinary time of progress since our last Board meeting. I want to thank all our staff for their hard work and passion, which we celebrated at our staff awards event in December. It was so important to share this progress with our local MPs in Westminster before the festive break. MPs help set national policy on mental health and they were all supportive of our services being funded properly and to achieve parity for mental health, so that our strong progress can continue.
We continue to be concerned about the long waits for children and young people in our neurodevelopmental services, so it was so heartening to hear that we have secured some extra funding with our commissioners to reduce these waiting times. As a Board we also discussed a more focussed approach to identify where harm may occur if a service user waits a long time for care. I have asked for this to come back to a Board meeting so we can discuss this in public.
Across our twelve major change programmes, our highest risk programme remains our efficiency, value and improvement(EVI) programme. Looking ahead, the Board were very pleased to hear that the detailed work plans for our major change programmes for 2026/27 are being developed now and I look forward to seeing these in Board in public in April as part of our discussion on Trust Strategy.
We heard updates throughout our Board meeting on performance progress, particularly the four key national metrics for NHS mental health Trusts which are: crisis performance, length of stay, performance for children and young people, and finally sickness absence. If our performance improves on these four metrics, our overall position nationally will improve, which is of course the direction we must go in. We saw an improvement in these metrics and others, but we know that we have so much more to do.
Our people, our colleagues and our culture are our key to our continued progress. I was particularly pleased to see our success and progress on both recruitment and retention. Looking at recruitment, we are appointing more nurses, psychologists and doctors to work in our Trust which is so good to see. And I was delighted to hear that we are making headway with the future pipeline for new nurses graduating this year, giving us more security in our staffing. The Board were assured that we are improving how we manage sickness absence, supporting colleagues better when they return to work. Our People and Culture Committee will be looking much more closely at why colleagues are off sick by considering our offer on health and wellbeing. And our staff survey results will come to our Board in April, and that will give us some really useful insight into how staff really feel about working at NSFT, and importantly, what more we need to do.
I want to thank our Board Committees who do so much detailed work on performance quality and safety. We had a good discussion about always being focussed on the people and communities we serve in the decisions the Committees and our Board make. The Board will stay closely focussed on how the Committees work together to identify where our areas of particular risk as we make progress towards continuous improvement.
We remain on target to break-even this year, having made good progress with our EVI programme, although there is still more to do. I continue to be concerned about our financial position looking to 2026/27. Sustainability on our finances is vital so we can deliver the improvements to the services we are totally committed to delivering. I will continue to advocate strongly locally and nationally on the need for sustainable funding for our mental health services. And to be focussed on transforming our clinical services.
Finally, I would personally like to acknowledge our achievement with no service users being placed out of Trust or out of area in recent months. I know the challenge will be sustaining this, recognising that pressures in many of our services continue. Thank you to all our teams for everything you continue to do, and I am really looking forward to meeting many of you on my visits to West Norfolk and West Suffolk in February and March with Caroline our Chief Executive.
Do look out for my next blog from our Board meeting on 9 April 2026.
Zoë
Zoë Billingham, Chair