Chairs Blog from Trust Board meeting on Thursday 6 August 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 August 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 6 August December, 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.
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.
I want to start my blog with our monthly TALK Awards for staff. It’s such a positive step to publicly congratulate our colleagues now we welcome our TALK awards our winners and runners up to our Board meetings. Huge congratulations to our winner for May, Abby Sandford, clinical team leader from Abbeygate ward in West Suffolk, and runner up Vicki King from the mental health liaison team in East Suffolk. For June, we congratulated Chloe Taylor, Associate Director for Nursing in West Suffolk, our runners up for June, the central bed management team. Well done to you all! Don’t forget to nominate colleagues via the new form.
Our Board service user experience story welcomed Sophie Davies, participation and children, families and young people facilitator and Andrea Bland from our patient experience team to recognise our brilliant group particip8! They place the voices of 350 children and young people in planning, developing and improving our services. I have personally met members of particip8! many times. Recently I’ve been really impressed by their communication cards initiative to help children and young people when they are interacting in care environments. We also heard how important music can be to help connect people with one another and their local communities. Thank you to our particip8! for all you do for our services, and also for helping on interview panels to recruit new colleagues. Your work is vital.
Before we began the full Board agenda, I shared a tribute to Roy Marsh, co-chair of our service user and carer council, a friend and colleague to many of us in the Trust. Roy made sure that the service user and carer voice was heard in everything we do. Roy gave us his time, insight and energy working tirelessly to improve the outcomes for service users and carers. Thank you Roy, you will be much missed. I also remembered Councillor Michael Chenery, a Trust Governor who contributed greatly to our Trust. Our thoughts are with Roy and Michael’s friends and families.
Our Chair and Chief Executive reports reflected a huge amount of progress and hard work across our Trust. We expressed our sincere gratitude to our teams for all the initiatives that are being rapidly moved forward. We also welcomed the Government’s announcement on the day of our Board meeting about new mental health emergency departments and our seven new neighbourhood mental health centres. Our success is securing capital money to develop these new facilities places our Trust at the vanguard of the implementation of exciting new initiatives for service users and marks an important step forward in developing a more positive national narrative about mental health services.
Everything we are working on across the organisation is covered under our twelve large scale change programmes, so I am really pleased we will now have an update on these at every Board meeting. And I was very pleased to see our integrated quality and performance report improve, making it much easier to read and understand. This report is vital because it shows how effective we are as we care for patients and look after our colleagues. It’s essential for our Board to make sure we have oversight of everything we do every day. I am particularly keen to see progress on some pressurised areas of our waiting lists, making sure service users are ‘waiting well’ and safe, especially for children and young people waiting for a neurodevelopmental assessment. The Board will continue to monitor this closely and discuss with our Integrated Care Board colleagues.
We always have a busy agenda for our Board meetings in public, and it’s impossible to mention them all in my blog, so I have set out my important highlights which I hope you find interesting.
Our Suffolk rehabilitation and recovery service (SRRS) have just received an overall rating of ‘good’ for their latest Care Quality Commission (CQC) Report. They have made tremendous progress from a requires improvement rating in 2022, a real tribute to the team and the service. It was a pleasure to welcome Chelsie Davies, Rebecca Bowen, Joe Spurling and Ally Munnings from the SRRS team to our Board to celebrate their success. The team were particularly proud of their kind and compassionate care being highlighted by the CQC and are ambitious to achieve an ‘outstanding’ rating now, which was terrific to hear. They were an inspiring team to meet.
Every death of someone in our care is a death too many, and every death means a family is devasted by loss. Our Trust remains committed to learning from deaths. The Board discussed the annual report for the last year and discussed all our learning from this report, with a strong focus on three areas - multi agency work, risk formation and the importance of physical health in mental health care. We continue to be indebted to bereaved families and carers who work with us to learn and improve our services. I look forward to seeing how our maturing approach on learning from deaths continues to develop.
Finally, but so importantly, I was particularly pleased to discuss our progress and next steps on our Trust race equity strategic plan on our Board agenda this month. Myself and our Board remain committed to race equity and becoming an anti-racist organisation as one of our top priorities. This work is an essential part of ensuring we make real progress. I hope to see more progress on our work on disciplinaries, and look forward to seeing our progress as we buddy-up with the North East London Trust who are doing some great work in this area. It was good to hear from our Head of Freedom to Speak Up Holly Stephens about how we are joining up our race work with supporting colleagues to speak up.
Thank you for taking time to read my blog and look out for my next one from our Board meeting on 1 October 2026.
Zoë
Zoë Billingham, Chair