Today our Board had a challenging discussion about our future strategy; one
in which we reflected on our previous aspirations and the changing world in
which we find ourselves.
When we took on community
services, we had a vision we could make a real difference to people’s lives. By
aligning community and mental health services within the same organisation, we felt
local people could truly benefit from a 'whole person' service approach;
bringing physical and mental health together.
We wanted to showcase the
combined impact that these two complementary 'Cinderella' services could make -
to support the hospitals buckling under the strain and, mostly importantly,
help change lives. We felt that we could provide a local voice and also a safe
haven and nurturing environment for our community services.
We have achieved some
great things, particularly around children's and older people services, the two
ends of life's full spectrum. Our physical health services benefited from a psychological perspective and vice versa.
But, for a whole host of
reasons, we have not been able to fully realise the vision we had for
integrated, whole person care.
Now, with the rise of
local care organisations (LCOs), we are seeing strong locality ownership for
improvement, with a desire for local providers to be very visible and active
within borough-based partnerships.
While people
have worked very hard to do this for both mental health and community services,
we have struggled to represent all elements of our portfolio with the same
strong voice in each LCO.
And that has brought us to
today. With a heavy heart, but a huge dose of realism, the recommendations in
the position paper on our future strategy were approved by our board this
afternoon. Click here to read our position paper.
As you know, it proposes
that we look at community services developing as part of local care
organisations and concentrate our efforts on mental health and learning
disability services in their widest sense. Allowing both to extend, enhance and
fulfil their potential for the benefit of local people in this changing new
world.
It was good to
see around 30 people in attendance at the board meeting, nearly all of those
staff. We opened up the meeting for public questions on our strategy position
paper, which included queries about specific services, next steps and possible
future providers.
We understand
and respect the different emotions that people are feeling, which include
disappointment and worries about the future. And we want to always work and
behave with complete integrity and compassion. The questions provided an opportunity
for us to talk about close partnerships, strong relationships with commissioners and being a strong local alliance member, as the future is about
collaboration.
This is all about people and we talked about our responsibilities
as a board to never do anything detrimental to patient care.
While the Board has
approved the direction of travel in principle, we need to gather lots of views
before our final strategy goes to our board in December.
It's been a journey to get
us to this first stage. I hope that the time many services have been with us
has been well spent, but accept that this time may be coming to an end.
We should always do the
right things for the right reasons, even if it's hard. And that includes
acknowledging we might not be the best organisation to continue providing a
service.
So, let's keep talking. We
want to hear your views and will be putting plans in place to do this. Let's
all help shape the future.
Thank you.
Henry
Henry
Dr Henry Ticehurst
Medical Director
Medical Director
I can't help but think that more money should be spent on the frontline of the service and less on the business/corporate/senior management end. Pennine should focus on the service users we represent and not on the creation of new senior managerial positions with fancy titles and limited frontline experience. This inequality exacerbates this constant financial pressure we are frequently reminded of. Perhaps at some point the board will see the wood for the trees and remind themselves why they work within a mental health service. *I don't expect this message to be in keeping with what is acceptable for comment and will never be published, censorship - However, hopefully Henry or someone of similar standing may get to read it, probably not...*
ReplyDeleteJust verbally shared this comment with my "frontline" colleagues. It received a resounding "hear hear" Over to you Henry!
DeleteThanks for your message, we always want to hear everyone’s views. We are looking very closely at every penny we spend, so that we can be more efficient and have more money to improve patient care. As Simon Stevens, the chief exec of the NHS said in his first speech, we all need to “Think like a patient and act like a tax-payer”.
ReplyDeleteHopefully that is an ethos that Pennine adopt.
ReplyDeleteIncidentally, I've noticed between senior management it is popular to Tweet. In fact it appears it is encouraged to use Social Media and that if you're not doing it then why not?
In terms of social media Simon suggests that
"Social media companies should be forced to pay a levy to fund treatment for a mental health crisis that they are helping to create"
So in popularising and encouraging the use of this medium are we indirectly contributing to Simon's concerns?