Our strategy: progress update event
Thank you to everyone who joined us at the start of June for the latest in our series of public strategy update events. We were joined by over 180 people and it was a great opportunity to celebrate successes and hold ourselves to account.
We held the event at St. George’s Cathedral in Southwark and online, bringing together members of our community, service users, carers and staff to look at the progress we have made in the last six months.
Our strategy Aiming High; Changing Lives sets out how the Trust will deliver outstanding mental health care for our communities by 2026.
To achieve our goals and best serve the people who use our services and their families we have five ambitions:
- Deliver outstanding mental health care
- Be a partner in prevention
- Be a catalyst for change
- Build a culture of trust together
- Become effective and sustainable
We have been clear from the beginning that we must be transparent and accountable on where we are making progress and those areas where we are not. Our strategy was created with staff, service users, carers, partners, families and community organisations and we promised to include people throughout our journey. As part of this commitment, we are holding strategy events every six months to reflect on and embrace challenge of our work. Our first was in October last year and the next one, later this year, will be focused on the anti-racism strategy.
We have made progress in providing outstanding personalised care. Dwayne, a carer for a family member with mental health needs, was motivated to take up an advisory role as a Patient Safety Partner with the Trust after witnessing how the process of accessing mental health support could be improved. He spoke of the importance of seeing people as people, not as a diagnosis. Dwayne’s advice is a valuable starting point for much of the Trust’s strategic work and reminds us that our work is first and foremost about individuals.
We have a profound responsibility in reducing instances of restrictive practice to improve the care we deliver. We are pleased with progress to meet our ambition of eliminating prone restraint and want to thank all staff for the commitment to meeting this ambition. Of particular note, instances of prone restraint have decreased by 88% in the last three years.
We have also launched Seni Lewis Training, which every staff member will take part in at some level. Seni Lewis was killed after being restrained by police officers at the Bethlem Royal Hospital in 2010. The training enables staff to learn the knowledge and skills to use prevention strategies to improve peoples’ quality of life and avoid distress or anger in mental health settings.
To be a partner in prevention, the Trust has invested time and resources in supporting people within the community. 23 employment advisors have been recruited since April 2022 and they have supported 84 people into competitive employment. And as a catalyst for change, we will continue to champion research given the impact it can have on our services and the lives of the people we serve. We are excited to open our Pears Maudsley Centre in partnership with King’s College London and the Maudsley Charity to combine cutting-edge research and outstanding clinical care. Building a culture of trust together speaks to a lot of the challenges the Trust faces. There is much work to be done but we are pleased that vacancy rates were reduced by 6% during 2022/23. The NHS continues to face significant financial challenges, and we are no different. But the Trust remains committed to becoming an effective and sustainable organisation.
However, as Aji Lewis, the mother of Seni Lewis, reminds us: we must not be complacent. There is so much more to do.
Many of our commitments, especially those set out in our Anti-Racism Action Plan, require transformation change. We look forward to continuing on this journey and sharing further updates at our next strategy event in October 2023.
Norman Lamb, Chair
David Bradley, CEO
