9 September 2021

AGM Speech 2021

Welcome to the CNWL 2021 AGM. ..and especially to our new Governors and the newest addition to the CNWL family: Harrow Children’s Services.

We are on zoom again but it is important to keep everyone safe. I am still looking forward to seeing you all face to face.

Before we begin the business of the AGM I would like us to remember the colleagues we have lost this year: Craig Goldsney ..a nurse from HMP Woodhill, Milton Keynes; Tseya Surenkhorloo..a nurse from our Older Adults service in Beatrice Place and Jodi Lombardini, the Head of our Addictions Service…. And the loved ones that you have lost… please let us take a few moments to remember them, thank them and honour them.

I start, as ever, by presenting our Annual Report.CNWL is a large Trust with over 9000 people in 7000 staff roles. We provide physical and mental health services, for all ages, across 11 London Boroughs, in Milton Keynes and in Surrey. And we have a growing portfolio of Health and Justice services supporting Courts and Prisons. Rather than reading the Annual Report let me highlight some of what we have been doing in the past year via a short film.

(The film and the Annual Report are both on our website as zoom is not the best way to watch a film)

The film has, I hope, given you a flavour of our last year. You will hear more about it from our Chief Executive Claire Murdoch and my other colleagues as our AGM progresses.

COVID has not gone away although we have learned to manage it better. Our Board salutes our staff once again for their courage and commitment for their work through COVID. We have not forgotten those who had to stay in hotels and didn’t see much of their families and those who caught COVID and came back to work as soon as they could. This year the Board sent every member of staff a thank you card and, as a small thank you gesture, gave everyone an extra day off on their birthday.

Once again our volunteers have been awesome. Thanks to them all. We have had hundreds of volunteers from the Digital Volunteers who helped families stay in touch during periods of high infection, to the drivers who drove all over the place fetching and carrying, to those who worked in our Check in and Chat service for patients and service users who might be lonely. This service will be continuing for our Carers. And no AGM can take place without me thanking our fantastic Carers. They have had to take on so much more in COVID. They act out of love but it can be a lonely and, on occasion, overwhelming role. So, let’s have loud round of applause for our Carers and our Carers Council who help us so much. Thank you Carers.

Like all Trusts we have been involved in the Vaccination programme and I am delighted that not only have we vaccinated lots of member so the public (over 100,000 people were vaccinated at our Heathrow hub for example) but we have one of the highest vaccination rates of staff in London.  Our staff vaccinated thousands of housebound people, people in care homes and people with learning disabilities.

Services which we had to stand down at the start of the first wave are now back up and were not closed during the more recent wave. For example, many of our sexual health staff were redeployed at one point and I would like to thank them for their flexibility and bravery in their redeployment. It is not easy to move specialty. Their services are now back and applying the lessons they learned in the lockdowns. For example, we now offer telephone consultations for sexual health, routine HIV care and contraception for service users who find this more convenient…and many do. And we have kept the Gordon hospital and its unsuitable wards closed and are working with Healthwatch on what a mental heath service should look like and we will shortly be starting a consultation on its future.

Despite the challenges of Covid we are continuing to innovate. We have invested in Electronic Prescribing which will improve patient care and safely by reducing prescribing, dispensing, administration and transcription errors. A great achievement by our Pharmacy Team and can I also thank them for their great work in the management of the vaccines we have used.

The CQC are still rating us a Good..mainly, in my view,  because they don’t have a category of Wonderful. We remain Good not simply because that is how inspections rate us but because when a service falls below standard we admit our failure and always, always, try to learn from it. When a mistake is made we aim to find out what went wrong rather than who made a mistake. Our Board  reviews incidents and learning at each of its meetings as you can see from our papers.

Related to this we held a Safety Conversation last November hosted by our Chief Medical Officer, Dr Con Kelly and our Chief Nurse, Maria O’Brien (both of whom you will hear from later). Attended by over 400 staff (an advantage of zoom...we could not have gotten that many people into a room) with 170 posters submitted for the Safety Awards Competition it focussed on creating a safe environment for patients and staff. The number of staff and service users engaged in Quality Improvement projects continues to grow.

COVID and its consequences have put an extraordinary amount of pressure on our workforce. And since a safe and supported workforce provides better care to patients and service users we have provided a number of support services for not just our staff but NHS staff working across other Trusts in North West London. ‘Keeping Well’ provides psychological support for staff in the NHS, the voluntary sector and in care homes and in Milton Keynes also for teachers. We have a Wellbeing Guardian in the shape of Paul Streets one of our Non Executive Directors and Carina Sheridan continues to do great work as our Freedom to Speak up Guardian and we encourage our staff to speak up if they have concerns.  We have created a network of 150 Domestic Abuse Ambassadors to signpost support for both our staff and our patients. Our Flu campaign was very successful last year , again with one of the best staff vaccination rates in London. And the film and song which we make each year featuring our Chief Medical Officer, Chief Nurse and Head of Infection Prevention Control is eagerly anticipated and will be released shortly.

You will have noted that there is an NHS Bill working its way through Parliament. In brief, the core theme of this Bill is that NHS services should be much better integrated and wrapped around the patient: an aspiration with which we most whole heartedly concur and are working towards. The vehicle for this integration with be Integrated Care Systems  and we are engaged in a number of them notably North West London, North Central London and Milton Keynes. ICS’s are enabling us to work much more closely with other local Trusts and the competitive tendering process between Trusts is to be largely banished. We will update you with progress and developments as they occur. You may have already seen some fruits of this collaboration, for example, the alignment of our Community Teams with groups of GP practices or the Provider Collaborative across North London in relation to Eating Disorder Services.

Our work in Grenfell and, more recently, in Church End and Alperton in Brent have taught us how important it is to listen to what people want and need from services: the users know best what they need and we are taking this model of coproduction to the work we have started in the last few weeks with the refugees and asylum seekers from Afghanistan.

The murder of George Floyd impacted on us all but especially on our ethnic minority staff. 46% of our staff are from ethnic minorities but our Senior Management and Board do not yet reflect this. Improving this is high on the list of Board priorities. This year we made progress on ethnic minority appointments at senior Bands and have initiated more career development opportunities  but there is a great deal more to do. All the Executive team are participating in Reverse Mentoring where an ethnic minority member of staff works with them to help them rethink their approach in the light of their experience. This is powerful. 

As ever, I would like to close with some thanks: to our partners; to all of our staff; to our Executive Team for their tireless work and commitment; to my Non Executive Director colleagues for their insight, challenge and commitment to CNWL and, finally and most especially to our Governors and  Lead Governor Cllr Ketan Sheth for your support, energy, interest and for your challenge which is always so well directed.

 

Thank you.