Improving Together – CEO Caroline Donovan’s Blog – 18 September 2024
Hi all, and welcome to my latest blog.
I was pleased to attend a national meeting on 3 September with NHS Chief Executives from across England and the new Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, Wes Streeting. I was really pleased to hear him set out his thoughts and plans where he outlined his top three priority policy areas for moving NHS treatment from:
- hospital to community
- analogue to digital
- treatment to prevention.
We also had a presentation on the themes from the Darzi Report, which was commissioned by the Secretary of State and published last week. This report will inform the development of the NHS and Social Care 10-year plan that we can expect to see published in 2025. There will no doubt be a change in national priorities in the coming months, but there is a real need to maintain our focus on our improvement plan which will enable NSFT to continue to improve and support the national direction of travel.
I’d like to spotlight the significant importance of our Safer, Kinder, Better Awards which launched less than two weeks ago. I am delighted we have already had over eighty nominations – a really terrific start!
We have so many excellent colleagues in our Trust and welcome our stakeholders to nominate individuals for our ‘Unsung Hero’ Award. Do you know someone who works at NSFT, who lives our values and is driven by our vision to provide safer, kinder and better care? If yes, please follow this link to find out more and nominate them.
As you know, we are mid-way through our programme to introduce a new leadership structure which will help us further improve the quality of care we provide, as well as the experience of our service users. This will see our current care groups replaced with five localities. Specialised services, such as eating disorders, the mother and baby unit and forensic services, will be hosted within the new localities.
We will shortly be able to announce our first locality team appointments following a rigorous national recruitment process. The Phase 2 process is now also well under way. If you have a question which has not yet been asked, please email faqfutureleadershipstructure@nsft.nhs.uk.
I am very pleased to let you know we have appointed a new organisational development partner to support our new locality structure, ‘Leadership in Care’. We are looking forward to working closely with this exciting and innovative team. They have a wealth of experience in clinical and operational leadership development across the NHS.
I am delighted to confirmed we have appointed Stewart Gee to our Board and executive team as our new Chief Transformation Officer. Stewart will be joining us from Cumbria, Northumberland, Tyne and Wear NHS Foundation Trust where he is Director of Safety, Security, Resilience And Trust Innovation.
We have longlisted a very strong field of applicants for our Director of Corporate Affairs role and will be interviewing in October.
Alongside this, another key step in our leadership approach and part of our improvement plan is the creation of a new Patient Experience Directorate which will be led by a new Chief Patient Experience Officer.
As a Trust Board, we have made a vital commitment to put our service users, carers, families, and communities first as an essential part of our improvement plan and our new Trust Strategy.
This new Patient Experience Directorate will lead on patient experience. We should rightly be proud of the number of people we employ with a lived experience in both peer support roles and in people participation lead roles.
We need to ensure we support people with a lived experience and encourage service users, carers, and families to have a voice through our trust, to challenge and support us to improve.
We have a great Recovery College that has recently celebrated its 10th anniversary.
The new Chief Patient Experience Officer role will support the team to develop this provision further, increasing in-person college sessions that are so important for patients to support their recovery.
The new directorate will also lead on our Trust approach to reducing health inequalities. We know that people with severe mental disorders die on average 10 to 20 years earlier than the general population – and this gap is worryingly growing. Only a minority of deaths of people with serious mental illness are attributable to unnatural causes, like suicide, homicide, or accidents. The majority of deaths are down to physical disorders, like cardiovascular, respiratory, and infectious diseases, diabetes, and cancer. Our detailed learning from deaths report that we published at our July Board meeting reflected this national picture.
There are some very stark facts in the UK which are worth reminding ourselves of:
- On average, women with a learning disability die 23 years younger than women.
- On average, men with a learning disability die 20 years younger than men.
- 42% of deaths of people with a learning disability are avoidable (LeDeR, 2023).
There are also so many barriers stopping people with a learning disability from getting healthcare. These include a lack of accessible transport links, a lack of involvement of carers, inaccurate diagnosis and insufficient follow-up care.
There is much for us to do, together with our system partners. So, you can see how vital this new role will be for our Trust. Once appointed, the Chief Patient Experience Officer and their team will work closely with our system partners and our five new localities to tackle the challenges we all face daily on health inequalities, experience and participation. This is key to our improvement and recovery as a Trust. I will keep you updated as we recruit to this post and implement the new team.
I am very pleased that, following a competitive interview process, Robyn Ward, who has been acting into the Head of the Chair and CEO Office, has been appointed on a substantive basis. Many of you will know Robyn who has worked for the Trust for twenty years, most recently as Head of Carers Participation. Robyn has such an amazing focus on service users and carers and brings a wealth of experience into the role.
I want to record my personal thanks and from those of our Board to Drs Sarah Maxwell and Sohail Abrar who have been excellent interim Chief Medical Officers ahead of the arrival of Dr Faisil Sethi who joined us on 6 September as our new Deputy Chief Executive and Chief Medical Officer. Sarah and Sohail added richness and wisdom to our executive team.
And finally, we held an excellent Trust Board strategy day last week in Ipswich. The whole day focussed on our improving quality programme. It was so good to be joined by colleagues from across the Trust to share the work they are doing on well led and the single assessment framework across all our clinical services. The whole Board was very impressed to see such great progress and to understand better how well our teams are now working together across Norfolk and Suffolk.
If you have any questions, please do get in touch with me.
Until the next time,
Caroline