Community Health Providers, Mental Health |

East of England

Norfolk & Suffolk FT

Developing a robust improvement programme to address the key quality and safety issues within a mental health trust

Norfolk and Suffolk Foundation Trust provides specialist mental health and learning disability care for people across Norfolk and Suffolk. They work with NHS and social care partners, service users, carers, the voluntary sector and the police to provide integrated health and social care mental health services in community and inpatient settings.

What We Did

From Spring 2022, we supported Norfolk and Suffolk Foundation Trust with the development and delivery of an Improvement Programme to address the Trust’s recent ‘Inadequate’ CQC rating and Section 29a Warning Notice – which threatened the ongoing viability of the Trust. Further to this, the Trust had been subject to ‘Recovery Support’ from NHSE for several years, with its challenges well-known and deep rooted. However, the Trust did not have in place an improvement programme, plan or change infrastructure to deliver the required change to address the CQC’s findings and exit NHSE’s recovery support process.

The client asked us to help them to develop a robust improvement programme that would rapidly address the key quality and safety issues in its first phase, before then moving on to address some of the strategic and structural challenges that the Trust had been grappling with for several years. This needed to include new governance and assurance arrangements, to provide oversight of delivery and ensure that improvements made were being embedded and sustained.

What Changed

We developed a structured programme of work based on best practice, giving structure to the delivery and governance of improvement. We also provided programme management resource, to help keep the trust on track while delivering an improvement programme that covered several workstreams spanning all services delivered by the Trust, including 108 Must Do actions identified by the CQC.

Results

We launched the Improvement Programme in March 2022, with phase 1 representing a focused 6-month programme of work to deliver the actions identified by the CQC ahead of their return in Autumn 2022. When the CQC returned, they recognised the significant improvement made and evidenced by the trust – upgrading the Trust from a rating of ‘Inadequate’ to ‘Requires Improvement’. The Section 29a Warning Notice was also lifted. This enabled us to then focus on the second phase of the improvement programme, to address the complex root cause issues that were holding the Trust back. This required detailed root cause analysis, and revision of our governance and delivery model to support the sustained delivery of deep-rooted change. We supported the Trust through this programme in 2023/24, with the Trust on course to exit the Recovery Support Programme in 2024/25.

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