Annual Report 2010-11 - West London Mental Health NHS Trust

We’ve already made good progress in terms of establishing a strong membership base
with the aim of recruiting 10,000 public members. Having an active membership base is a
crucial component of becoming an FT as it will give people from our local communities a voice
in the strategic development and decision-making processes in the organisation. We’re also
preparing to run elections, which will take place later in the year to establish an active
Council of Governors.
We’ve been working on a number of enabling strategies covering areas such as estates,
membership, involvement and clinical governance, all of which will be key in helping us achieve
our aims to become an FT. We’ll be putting these supporting strategies into action in the
year ahead.
More purposeful involvement
Our involvement agenda is expanding because we know we need to be more inclusive and
work more closely with service users and carers than we have in the past in improving and
developing services.
We’re currently working with service users, carers and our Trust-wide involvement leads to
review all of our involvement activities. Our aim is to re-focus these so they become more
central to the business of the Trust. This means making sure that the contribution of service
users and carers consistently influences the way we develop, evaluate, plan and improve
services. It’s also our aim that all involvement activities are recovery-focussed, so benefiting the
service users who opt to work with us.
Changing our governance arrangements
A review of our governance structures showed us that there was substantial room for
improvement. We have plans in place to change our governance structures this year to give us
the assurance we need that we’re delivering safe, cost effective and quality services in all areas
of our business.
The new committees are:
1. Trust Management Team (replaces the current Operations Board) and will be the main
executive decision-making meeting of the Trust.
2. Finance and Investment Committee will provide overview and assurance on financial
performance, strategic financial and capital planning.
3. Quality Committee is the senior clinical governance committee for the Trust that will
oversee a programme of work in relation to clinical effectiveness, patient safety and
patient and carer experience. The Research and Development Group also reports into
this committee and a new forum called Quality Watch will provide an opportunity for
commissioners and partners of the Trust to meet and review quality initiatives.
Service users at Ealing
4. Audit Committee retains its position as the senior committee of the Board providing
assurance on all aspects of the Trust’s business.
Clinical dashboards
Following a thorough assessment of the presentation and use of policies and procedures at
the Trust we’ve successfully maintained NHSLA level 1. (The National Health Service Litigation
Authority (NHSLA) handles negligence claims and works to improve risk management practices
in the NHS.)
The next step is to work towards level 2, which we hope to be in a strong enough position to
achieve next year. Before that, and based on feedback from our level 1 assessment, we have a
great deal of work still to do which we’ve put into an action plan to make sure the necessary
actions are owned and carried out.
Service users and carers continue to tell us that quality of care is not consistently excellent
across the Trust. To address this we’ll be introducing clinical dashboards which will be used by
our staff across the organisation.
The dashboards, visible when people log onto their computers, will give real-time information
on measures which reflect the safety and clinical effectiveness of services, as well as information
regarding service users’ experiences of our services. This will give us a clear picture of the quality
of our services and will help us steer our efforts towards further improvement.
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2010 2011