Trust designs a set of strategic ambitions to provide high quality services and enhance patient experience, resulting in achieving outstanding CQC rating

Challenges

 Caring, Discovering, Growing: Together. This perfectly sums up the ambition for Northumberland, Tyne and Wear Foundation Trust (NTW) and its fitting that this is the title of our new five year strategy.

This is articulated as six strategic ambitions, which weave throughout the organisation:-

•Providing excellent care, supporting people on their personal journey to wellbeing

•A great place to work

•Doing everything we can to prevent ill health and offering support early

•Striving for joined up services

•A centre of excellence for mental health and disability support

•Sustainable services that are good value for money

Actions

 Reaching this point has been a whole team effort. Every clinical and non-clinical member of staff has been required to pull in the same direction. Our CQC inspections was a major focus for 2016, giving us the opportunity to put our best feet forward. Our approach, set by the chief executive, was to be calm, confident and never complacent. Mainly though, our aim was to show the best of what NTW does every day and acknowledge and improve the areas we are conscious that we want to develop further. Leadership at all levels and in all areas is an essential part of our development.

Our collective leadership approach enables clinical and other leaders to come together with colleagues to develop their leadership abilities in the context of collective responsibility and shared values. Clinical leadership is hardwired into all of our work. Our values and our strategy have been established from the heart of our organisation, with conversations beginning and developing within the networks of staff, service users and carers which flourish across our services.

Our staff engagement initiative ‘speak easy’ is in its seventh cycle. Bringing together staff from different services on a locality basis to meet face to face with executive directors and each other to work through some of the most meaty issues which face us. The service user and carer network (including representatives of many local organisations) meet regularly to provide a helpful challenge and a focus for collaboration on shared priorities which really get to the heart of issues that matter to patients and their families. Alongside that our ever growing army of peer support workers is working tirelessly to challenge stigma wherever it exists and ensure that services are truly focused on understanding and valuing the lived experience within our community.

Even with an outstanding CQC assessment, there is much more that we are still working on:

•Our ‘positive and safe’ work ensures that we continue to make our services safer and free from violence

•Our Respond Training and partnership working with the police helps people in crisis to receive better services from the emergency services

•Our mindfulness courses, developed with advocacy organsiations, supports people with a learning disability to access self-help in a way which hasn’t been considered before.

Results

 The most obvious and impressive outcome in the last 12 months is our exceptional CQC outcome, becoming one of only two mental health trusts to be rated outstanding following a comprehensive inspection. The pride we still feel across the organisation is palpable. As well as the overall result, a number of services were the first and only of their type to be rated outstanding. For example- mental health community teams. On top of this we were able to meet all of our financial requirements of 16/17.

Spread

 NTW has been delighted to welcome numerous trusts, national experts and politicians to visit us over recent months to understand how we have reached these standards. We enjoy the challenge they bring and are keen to learn as much from them as they can from us. We are always delighted when we can support improvements in care elsewhere in the country. We are also working with NHSI nationally to share our improvement methodology and contribute to sector development overall. We play an active role in mental health and learning disability policy development through our engagement with NHS Providers.