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, G overnors, 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 250 0 people to find out what they thought was important.
We kicked the process off with a launch event on 26 November 2025, we also he ld in person community events in each of the four boroughs the Trust serves, and two event s 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 a cross our sites, and visited staff networks, teams and wards to hear direct ly from staff . We also received over 200 responses to our online survey, which was open to everyone and available in multiple languages.
Meet the Team Behind the Strategy Refresh
Extensive engagement has been carried out to inform the Trust’s strategy refresh, with over 2,500 interactions involving patients, carers, staff, partners and the wider community. This included a hybrid launch event attended by 158 people, alongside two dedicated events for service users and carers, four borough-based sessions, and seven focus groups with diverse communities.
In addition, 58 presentations and meetings with partners and community organisations engaged more than 600 people, while a survey gathered 229 individual responses. Staff engagement was also a key part of this work, with contributions through live broadcasts, Listening into Action visits, staff network events, leadership forums and manager-led briefings.
This wide-ranging approach has ensured that a broad and representative range of voices has helped shape the future direction of the Trust.
Learn about our engagement workYou 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 wi th you an d we will let you know what has changed as a result of yo ur 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 th e ideas we discussed during the engagement period .
- 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.
- 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.
- Innovation and learning – delivering high quality, evidence-based services and developing new evidence to keep improving the care we provide.
- 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.
Our current strategy
Our strategy has been built on the feedback of hundreds of staff, service users, carers and partners with the support of many community organisations.
There is no doubt that COVID-19 has created an altered landscape for mental health. We have built on the strong foundations of our previous strategy, Changing Lives, to go further and faster in those areas which are fundamental to the delivery of outstanding care and treatment for everyone who uses our services.
This strategy resets our focus on five key ambitions where together with our staff, service users, carers, communities and partners, we believe we can have the greatest impact on improving people’s lives.
Our Five Strategic Ambitions
Our ambitions under this strategy reflect the complex and dynamic environment that we work in. They build on our Changing Lives strategy to go further in the areas that are vital to delivering outstanding care. By 2026 we will do the following:
- 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
Read more about our strategy
- Aiming High; Changing Lives - Full strategy (PDF)
- Aiming High; Changing Lives - Summary (PDF)
- Aiming High; Changing Lives - Easyread version (PDF)