Improving Together – CEO Caroline Donovan’s Blog – 25 November 2024
Hi everyone,
I want to begin my blog this week on a personal note. You will know that I announced in July that I would be staying with the Trust until Summer 2025. As Zoë Billingham our Chair said at the time, we planned to start the recruitment for a new substantive Chief Executive this autumn. A recruitment process is now well underway. After much thought and reflection on the progress we are starting to make on our improvement journey, and having spoken to colleagues, I have decided I am going to apply for the substantive Chief Executive role. The recruitment process continues and interviews will be held in December.
Clearly there is much we are doing to strengthen our leadership across the Trust, particularly to increase our clinical leadership. I am pleased that we have announced that the second wave of appointments have now been made as part of our ongoing programme to introduce a new future leadership structure at NSFT. This includes appointments to clinical leadership and management roles in our five new localities and within specialist services. The third and final phase of the consultation has now taken place and involves staff in roles with leadership responsibility, such as matrons and service managers. We expect appointments to be made to these roles in December. We will then start to roll out the future leadership structure across NSFT from January. This will take some time, and our current care groups, roles and responsibilities will remain in place while we make the transition. I am grateful for everyone’s support during this transition period.
Interviews for a Director of Patient Experience and Safer Care and Locality Director roles took place last week, with more interviews to follow this week. These roles are incredibly important and are all central to our improvement and recovery as a Trust.
I was also pleased to meet with many of our MPs last week with our Chair Zoë Billingham, Dr Faisil Sethi and colleagues from the two Integrated Care Boards (ICBs). We presented an update on our improvement programme, and spoke about our work to develop localities through our leadership structure. We will meet again with MPs in person in Westminster in January. I welcome our MPs interest in our services and will be working with Zoe to arrange visits to our services in their constituencies, and introductions to our new locality leadership teams.
With Executive colleagues, I was really pleased to meet with Care Group leaders to talk through their local EVI (efficiency, value and improvement) programmes and the fair recruitment process we have set up recently. We have real opportunities to strengthen our clinical pathways and efficiency, the national and regional benchmarking information helps to illuminate these. It was reassuring to hear of the work going on across all our services to focus on ensuring efficiency and value whilst maintaining service quality. It will be the first of many of these forums as we work to achieve a break-even position for 2024/ 25. Thank you for all you are doing so far; we know we have a lot more to do in the last four months of the year.
Together with over 100 public sector leaders I attended the National Leadership Forum 2024 on 14 November in London. Parliamentary Secretary, Cabinet Office, Georgia Gould OBE MP gave a keynote address. This was a really important cross sector leadership event focussing on how we can collectively work together to forge a common purpose and help us all deliver more effectively for the citizens we serve.
I also attended the NHS Providers Conference in Liverpool, along with over 700 senior NHS leaders. It was really valuable to hear from leaders across the sector, and to have time to think and reflect on how learning from this event can support our improvement journey. Listening to the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, Wes Streeting, and Amanda Pritchard, NHS England Chief Executive, was thought-provoking. In her keynote speech, Amanda indicated the imminent publication of a revised NHS operating framework and oversight and assessment framework which will indicate different roles and accountabilities of providers, ICBs and NHS England in the future. It was particularly interesting to hear that the NHS use of agency staff is now the lowest on record, and that there has been a 15% increase in contacts for mental health nationally.
Many of you will be aware that mental health campaigners from Norfolk and Suffolk have travelled to London today to meet MPs to raise concerns. The Campaign to Save Mental Health Services in Norfolk and Suffolk is raising concerns about prevention of future death reports that mention the Trust. We continue to work with service users, carers, families and campaign groups as we progress with our improvement journey and ambition to provide safer, kinder, better care. We meet regularly with the Campaign committee, with our most recent meeting in mid-October, and a further meeting arranged for January. Campaign committee members are involved in our learning from deaths work, helping the Trust to improve future patient care and services. We continue to work closely with them and have found the feedback and insight they have given to our improvement work to help shape future services valuable. We know there is still much more work to be done to improve how we deliver care and services, and we are committed to making the necessary changes to ensure that we provide compassionate and effective support to all those who rely on our services.
I want to congratulate Woodbridge Holistic Assessment Team who were finalists at the East Suffolk and North Essex NHS Foundation Trust (ESNEFT) Awards a couple of weeks ago. NSFT colleagues Jo Clarke, Senior Mental Health Nurse in Primary Care, Alice Bird, Psychological Wellbeing Practitioner with Suffolk Talking Therapies and Ruth Mills, Consultant Clinical Psychologist, were honoured to be part of a team nominated as finalists in the ‘Time Matters’ category at the ESNEFT Awards. The nomination for the team recognised the unique, time and cost efficient, multidisciplinary approach to preventing falls and associated physical and mental health difficulties. It’s a great example of partnerships in action to improve care.
Looking ahead, we have our Trust Board meeting in public this Thursday 28 November at Ipswich Town Football club. For the first time, we will be live-streaming our meeting, so you can watch online. We will be welcoming our new Non Executive Director (NED) Marie-Claire Delbrouque, or MC as she likes to be known. MC was born and raised in Suffolk and has dedicated her career to supporting communities across Norfolk and Suffolk. She currently works in the social housing sector as a managing director and is the CEO of a local homelessness charity.
We had so many entries for our Safer, Kinder, Better Annual Staff Awards – over 600! After I announced our new special category - the Rising Star Award – in my last blog, we received nearly 100 nominations from across the organisation. I was delighted with this response, so thank you all. This award will recognise someone who has shown exceptional promise, leadership potential, and unwavering dedication in their role within our Trust. The Rising Star Award celebrates those who have made a significant impact in their area of practice and is a future leader. I am really looking forward to announcing our winners on 12 December – look out for the shortlist soon. What an opportunity to celebrate our people, who really are our most important asset.
Thank you for everything you continue to do. Until the next time.
Caroline