5 Boroughs Partnership NHS Foundation Trust Annual ... - Monitor

Knowsley Overview and Scrutiny Board
Commentary to the 5 Boroughs NHS Partnership Foundation Trust
The Knowsley Overview and Scrutiny Board welcomes the opportunity to
provide a commentary on the 5 Boroughs NHS Partnership Foundation
Trust Quality Account.
The Board has delegated responsibility for considering Quality Accounts to
the Chair of the Overview and Scrutiny Board in consultation with the Lead
and Deputy Lead Member for the Well-Being theme. A meeting was
convened on Wednesday 9 May to consider the Quality Account document
received by the 5 Boroughs Partnership NHS Trust. The three members
spent time considering the document and made a number of observations,
which have formed the basis of the Board’s commentary, as set out below.
We focused our discussions around three priority areas. Our first was the
Trust’s Improvement Priorities for 2012-2013 and the achievements
highlighted over the previous year. We discussed where we thought work
should be commended and whether there were areas where we felt more
information may have been useful. Our final observations referred to the
layout, style and format of the document - particularly focusing on how the
document related to and/or involved the public.
We felt that the Trust’s priorities for improvement highlighted specific areas
where improvements should be made although, like other Quality
Accounts, we were unclear as to the rationale behind them. In terms of last
year’s achievements we felt that the Trust’s work around patient safety
was good - particularly the Patient Safety Framework, which had been put
in place to ensure quality and safety activities were co-ordinated. We felt
that the Trust’s work on training and workforce development was
extremely positive - particularly the way service users had been involved in
contributing to training practices. Similarly, we thought that the Trust’s
focus on service user involvement in patient safety and Trust business in
general was commendable. Our only comment was that we felt it was
important that the Trust ensured that patients and their
carers/friends/relatives were at the heart of decision-making around a
patients’ care needs.
We were reassured to see that the Trust’s action plan in response to the
CQC inspection has now been fully completed. We agree that the Trust
needs to feel confident that its safeguarding processes meet the needs of
all service users. We felt that the Trust’s performance against local and
national targets was good and would like to see the thresholds for
Monitor’s community care indicators in next year’s report.
Annual Report and Annual Accounts 2011-12 125