This week’s leadership message is from Dawn Lawson, Executive Director of Strategy, Inclusion and Change at South West Yorkshire Partnership NHS Foundation Trust

Posted on: 17 January 2025

Dawn Lawson "Our purpose is to help people reach their potential and live well in their communities. We do this through living our values and actions, directed by the ambitions and objectives we set through our strategy.”

Hello, my name is Dawn.

For those of you who don’t know our trust, we provide inpatient and community mental health, learning disability and wellbeing services in Barnsley, Calderdale, Kirklees and Wakefield. We also provide physical health community services in Barnsley. We provide specialist secure mental health (forensic) services for the whole of Yorkshire and Humber. We have almost 5,000 colleagues, in both clinical and non-clinical support services, working hard every day to make a difference to the lives of service users, their families and carers. We have the privilege of having over 83,000 contacts with our service users, their families and carers every month. How we work is as important to us as what we do, and our values really matter to us.

One of the first things I set out to do when I came into this role a year ago was to refresh our trust strategy. For me this isn’t just a document that sits on a shelf, it’s something that is woven through our trust, embedded in everything we do. It should help us do what we do every day. That’s why I wanted to make sure the voices of our colleagues at all levels were heard. It was also important that the people we serve and the communities in which we deliver our services could share their views too.

I wanted to hear from people about their challenges, goals and ambitions for how we can be the best we can be, and how we can make the biggest difference to the people we serve and our colleagues.

To achieve this, we launched an #allofus conversation. This engagement sought views through a mix of face-to-face conversations, digital and paper surveys. We hosted over 65 face-to-face conversations with our colleagues, including workshops and drop-in sessions led by our board. We also visited teams and services across our footprint to hear the voices of those we otherwise wouldn’t. Along with our digital survey, this meant we heard from nearly 25% of our workforce, and over 1,500 members of the community. All our 75 partners contributed their views.

Our engagement told us that our purpose should stay the same, helping people reach their potential and live well in their communities, but that our aims would change. Our three aims which we will take forward through to 2030 are that:

We will live our values
We will be the best we can be
We will be ambitious

But we won’t sit still with these aims. For each strategic aim, using the evidence from our engagement and analysis, we have:

set out our strategic objectives and what this means we will do
set out what we will see if we are getting it right
started to identify how we will measure progress

This means that we have a strong line of sight from our new strategy through to what we do in practice, and measures which will enable us to be very clear whether we are achieving what we set out to do.

There is no denying that our new strategy comes in the context of a challenging next five years. We are part of an NHS that awaits a new 10-year plan, an NHS which is under significant pressure from demand and finances, as well as low public confidence.

In our complex and uncertain environment, I believe the strong engagement work we have done to shape our new strategy gives us a clear plan of what we want to achieve, and how we will know if we have achieved what we set out to. We will review our impact and progress with our colleagues and those we serve. This means that year on year we will understand what we are getting right and where we can improve from the perspective of our colleagues and our communities.

We are proud of our refreshed strategy and are confident it will make a real difference. I would like to thank those who made time to generously share their views with us, our strategy is very much stronger because it was created with the voices of those we serve, our colleagues and partners.

Thank you for reading.

We also have a blog from Sonya Robertshaw, Workforce Lead for the Mental Health, Learning Disability and Autism Programme

Hello, my name is Sonya. My role involves working with organisations across the West Yorkshire system to develop collaborative approaches to support the recruitment, retention and wellbeing of our workforce.

One such approach has led to the development of a new pilot scheme running across the West Yorkshire health and care system. The programme, delivered by our HR team and the West Yorkshire Staff Mental Health and Wellbeing Hub, will focus on avoiding harm in our employee investigations.

Speaking as a professional with a background in HR, I can say that one of the hardest parts of the job is supporting managers with disciplinary matters. The process can be formal, sometimes involve interviewing lots of witnesses and can take a long time to complete. Quite often the member of staff concerned is off work whilst the investigation is ongoing. Emotions run high, and the process can be upsetting for all concerned.

As HR managers who trained years ago, we were taught to follow process, weigh up the legal risks and tick every box. When we're caught up in our work and have lots of investigations in hand, we can sometimes lose sight of the fact that there are real people at the heart of it, with families to support, who quickly become isolated. Often those at the heart of the investigation suffer with their mental health and wellbeing because of the process.

All our organisations have wellbeing leads and occupational health providers, but we don’t always work together when developing our process to explore how we can ensure we adopt a compassionate approach and prevent harm being caused. In addition to harm to the individual, poorly applied processes can cause the organisation reputational harm and there is a significant financial cost when staff are off work for considerable amounts of time whilst processes are ongoing.

With the above background and understanding of the impact of the processes, I was really interested to hear about the work being developed in NHS Wales around ‘avoidable employee harm’. The work is being led by Andrew Cooper, head of programmes in Aneurin Bevan University Health Board. Andrew also leads the ‘improving employee investigations’ work across NHS Wales with Health Education and Improvement Wales.

The focus on avoiding harm in employee investigations has subsequently been taken up by the Healthcare People Management Association (HPMA) who have published the ‘When we do harm’ paper. The programme draws on learning from the patient safety movement and this animation video highlights the importance of the work, by changing the culture and approach to ensure that formal processes are always ‘a last resort’.

We are delighted to be working with Andrew and colleagues from NHS Wales for our West Yorkshire Partnership Avoidable Employee Harm pilot programme. It has attracted a huge amount of interest and we now have three mental health trusts, two acute trusts, the ICB and one local VCSE organisation taking part. We held our first virtual session in November and have an in-person training session taking place on Thursday 23 January 2025, reaching up to 100 of our local HR professionals, managers, wellbeing leads and trade union representatives. The pilot is being developed as a train-the-trainer model to support sustainability going forward.

If you’re interested in being involved in the pilot and attending the session on Thursday 23 January, please email sonya.robertshaw@nhs.net

What's been happening this week?

Recognition for West Yorkshire Training Hub

Colleagues from the West Yorkshire Training Hub were recently shortlisted at the2024 General Practice Awards. The Training Hub was shortlisted twice in the ‘HCP Education Programme/Provider of the year’ category for their General Practice Nurse Development Fellowship and the research project which supported the case and structure of the fellowship programme.

The General Practice Nurse (GPNs) Development Fellowship aims to support GPNs who have been working as a GPN for two years or more by providing peer networks, expert help and guidance on career pathways, mentorship and specific learning delivered through four locality based group sessions. Evaluation and feedback from the GPNs that have completed the programme has been positive, demonstrating an impact on general practice workforce retention

For more information on the fellowship programme and the West Yorkshire Training Hub please visit: West Yorkshire - Training Hub

Airedale endoscopy unit gets JAG accreditation

The endoscopy unit at Airedale Hospital has been awarded accreditation following an assessment by the Joint Advisory Group (JAG) of the Royal College of Physicians.

This formal accreditation is only awarded to endoscopy services which meet the highest standards covering all aspects of an endoscopy service, including quality and safety, patient experience and the workforce. Full details are on the Airedale website.

Road to Genome podcast

Series 4 of The Road to Genome podcast launched this week, featuring an interview with the rapping Consultant, Clinical Geneticist Professor Julian Barwell about Fragile X, Cancer Genomics and Rapping.