The future of your local mental health services
Our current strategy, Aiming High; Changing Lives, is due to come to an end this year, and so we have started a process to refresh it. Our strategy guides our work as an NHS Trust and will set our priorities for the next five years. We wanted to hear from the whole Trust community: service users, carers and families, Governors, members of staff, communities, partners, and the wider public across south London to help us get this right. We ran an extensive engagement period from November 2025 to March 2026. Now we are taking all the ideas and feedback you shared with us to help build our strategy.
Refreshing the Trust Strategy
What we’ve done so far...
Last year we looked at lots of information to help us understand our current position and how things have changed since we launched our current strategy in 2021. Then we started working with a group of service users, carers, staff and community partners to develop our ideas for what the future strategy should focus on. We also decided to include the option to change our Trust vision and mission during this process and created some ideas for what they could be.
Next, we shared our ideas so far and engaged with over 2000 people to find out what they thought was important.
We kicked the process off with a launch event on 26 November 2025, we also held in person community events in each of the four boroughs the Trust serves, and two events specifically for service users and carers. We spent hundreds of hours briefing our system, community, voluntary and charity partners and collecting their feedback too. We hosted pop up stalls to engage with staff and service users across our sites, and visited staff networks, teams and wards to hear directly from staff. We also received over 200 responses to our online survey, which was open to everyone and available in multiple languages.
You said, we did – what's next?
Now we are taking everything that everyone shared with us, examining it all in detail and using that feedback to make changes to our ideas and develop our new strategy. This will be reviewed in line with our organisational governance procedures and the refreshed strategy will be launched at an event in autumn. At the event we will share our strategy with you and we will let you know what has changed as a result of your feedback.
Our initial ideas for what the Strategy could focus on
From our work with a group of service users, carers, staff and community leaders, four areas emerged. These are the ideas we discussed during the engagement period.
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Improving care outcomes – we think this should be our number one focus as it’s right at the heart of our purpose. It means doing everything we can to make the biggest positive impact through the care and support we provide.
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Improving experience – for everyone. We want to get the basics right for our service users and their carers and families, and give our staff the support they need.
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Innovation and learning – delivering high quality, evidence-based services and developing new evidence to keep improving the care we provide.
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Equity and inclusion – as there is no quality without equity.
We also developed some ideas for our vision and mission.
Keep up to date with the Strategy Refresh
You can stay informed of our progress on the Strategy Refresh by signing up to our newsletter. We’ll send you key updates and make sure to invite you to the strategy launch in autumn.
