Chairs Blog from Trust Board meeting on Thursday 9 April 2026 | News and events

Welcome to my latest Chair’s blog following our April Board meeting. 

As a reminder, I write my blog after every Trust Board meeting in public, this means you can hear direct from me about what we talk about at our Board meetings. 

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

• Championing innovation on improvement across all our services 

I was delighted to welcome our experienced   new  Associate Non-Executive Director Hussein Khatib  to his first Board meeting with NSFT. Hussein is a senior adult and paediatric nurse who has held professional and corporate roles in both hospital and community settings. He brings with him a vast amount of experience and talent and we are delighted to have him with us.

It was a real pleasure to present  Dr Toral Thomas  with a certificate and thanks after   he was named   the  winner of February’s TALK Awards. Our Trust TALK Awards are our monthly awards scheme which has been designed to recognise NSFT staff who embody our Trust TALK Values: We are a Team; We are Accountable; We Learn and Improve; We are Kind. 

Dr Thomas works in Great Yarmouth and Waveney and was chosen as our overall winner by a judging panel. His nomination said: “Dr Thomas deserves an immense amount of recognition for his tireless efforts in managing the procurement of the electronic patient record in addition to managing his inpatient caseload and his responsibility as a specialist trainer. His sunny disposition and his solution-focused outlook are truly inspirational.” 

I was delighted to recognise Dr Thomas and to hear how thrilled he was to receive the award. It was a pleasure to celebrate his professionalism, kindness and leadership. Unfortunately, our runner up, Rebecca Young, was unable to attend to receive her certificate. We wish her the very best and will of course invite her to attend a Board in the future to receive this.

This month our Board heard from our staff about their experiences of culture in the Trust. I would like to say a huge thank you to  Talent Beiley, Percy Mupemhi and Neil Lad  who shared their experiences on our work on  race equity and culture. Our work on race affects everything that we do and is integral to improving our culture and staff experience. Talent, Percy and Neil spoke about how far the Trust has come over the last year in terms of improving race equity in our organisation and how much more progress still needs to be made. We also heard that Percy and Talent are the new joint Chairs of our Race Equality and Cultural Heritage (REACH) Staff Network Group. On behalf of the Board, I would like to say a heartfelt thank you to them for sharing their experiences so honestly and openly. I was so pleased to hear they felt genuine change in our organisation but we recognise we have so much further to go. Our Chief Executive, Caroline Donovan, has been instrumental in driving our commitment to race equity across our Trust, and I would like to acknowledge her leadership in this incredibly important area. 

There was huge pride as we recognised the very positive  Care Quality Commission report into our older adult inpatient services . The CQC rated these services as ‘good’ overall, with ‘good’ ratings across all five domains, and praised colleagues as “kind, compassionate and empathetic”. This represents a significant step forward on our improvement journey, and those working in these services should be immensely proud. My sincere thanks go to them all. Our ambition is to see all our services provide consistent, high-quality care and for us to receive a good rating from the CQC across the board. We are working incredibly hard towards this. 

It was great to hear that our  capital bids for Mental Health Emergency Departments have been successful  and will now move to a business case stage.   This would be a hugely exciting development, and we look forward to sharing more information as soon as we are able to. 

Our partnership funding bid to  NHS Charities Together and NHS England, through the Workforce Wellbeing Programme, has also been successful. Working collaboratively, primary care organisations and NSFT have secured £250,000 to deliver vital wellbeing and postvention support for NHS staff across Norfolk and Suffolk. It’s such a good example of working in partnership with our primary care colleagues to support our staff and will encourage colleagues to reach out for help or support if they need it. 

We held our first ever  Making Families Count  event at Hellesdon at the end of March. Colleagues heard directly from three bereaved families who had lost loved ones in our Trust’s care. We are deeply grateful to the families who shared their experiences so honestly with us and are committed to making real and sustained improvements in how we work. 

It was great to hear an update on our  large-scale change programmes  and our  Trust Annual Plan for 2026/27, including the Financial Plan for 2026/27. NHS England has accepted our plan and this was approved by the Board. 

We had some important conversations around our  NHS staff survey results. It is disappointing that despite seeing significant improvement in the level of participation, scores remain similar to previous years. There is a huge amount of work being done to make positive changes across the Trust and it’s so important that we get this right so we can ensure our colleagues, who are absolutely fundamental to us, enjoy coming to work, feel they are making a difference, and are able to provide a fantastic service to our service users, carers and families.

We were pleased to welcome  Roy Marsh, Trust-wide Service User and Carer Council Co-Chair. Roy gave an update on the progress of our  five new locality councils. Recruitment to these councils is ongoing and we talked about how we can support and encourage a diverse membership of these councils, which are fundamental to our ongoing work in placing service users and carers at the heart of everything we do. 

As always, I want to extend my sincere thanks to our colleagues across the Trust for their continued dedication and professionalism. We know there is still much to do, but the progress we are making shows what is possible when we work together with honesty, kindness and determination. I also want to thank our Board Committees who do so much detailed work on performance, quality and safety. 

Along with my blog about our discussions at our Board meeting on 9 April, I’m also sharing a copy of my Chair’s report (page 30) and the report from Caroline Donovan our Chief Executive (page 40). You can read these reports here. They’ll give you more detail about what we’ve been working on over the last couple of months. 

Our Board meeting is always live streamed for anyone who wants to watch live or watch later through the recording which we share online. 

Do look out for my next blog following our next Board meeting on 4 June. 

Zoë

Zoë Billingham, Chair