Tuesday 12 August 2014

Welcome from our Chair and Chief Executive



(from GIFS for the masses http://www.tumblr.com/tagged/evil-smile )

I started to read the Annual Report and Accounts for Southern Health NHS Foundation Trust for 2013/14 – available here on the Monitor website https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/339872/HANTSPART_Annual_Report_and_Accounts_2013-14_1_.pdf

A blogpost on their 2012/13 annual report is here http://chrishatton.blogspot.co.uk/2014/03/a-public-accounting.html

I’m afraid I only got as far as the first two pages, the opening ‘Welcome from our Chair and Chief Executive’. 

Below is why – the plain text is the ‘Welcome’ in full – the material in square brackets, erm, isn’t.

1. Welcome from the Chair and Chief Executive [it’s not just the Chief Executive, right, we’re all in it together here at Southern Health]

On behalf of the Board of Southern Health NHS Foundation Trust we are pleased to present the Annual Report and Accounts for the financial year 2013/14.

When we visit the services [erm, where do the Chair and Chief Executive work if they are visiting their own services?] we are genuinely humbled by how tremendously hard our staff work [criticise anything about our service and you’re criticising these hard working people, you callous bounder] and we look to encourage and inspire them [we don’t do anything ourselves, we encourage and inspire] to continually seek to improve the services they provide [notice guys, ‘they’ provide the services, not us, OK?].

Although 2013/14 had proven to be a challenging year [completely unexpected guv, nothing we could predict, no sirree], we are grateful for the hard work of our staff in delivering high quality healthcare [see above – diss us and you diss all those hardworking staff, and besides it’s them doing the healthcare, not us – we ‘inspire’], and for the support of our Governors, patients and community [so it’s not just the staff, it’s everyone – if you’re not supporting us then you’re not part of any of these groups so bog off] throughout this period [it’s just a passing period phase].

We have faced significant scrutiny over the past year [so much in such a short phrase! ‘faced’ implies that scrutiny is an opponent/enemy? Also implies that the scrutiny has been imposed from outside rather than being the result of the actions of the Trust? And why weren’t they facing significant scrutiny before the past year?], in particular non-Hampshire Learning Disability Services [it’s those learning disability bastards outside our ‘real’ Hampshire services for ‘normal’ people] and some Mental Health inpatient services in Hampshire [cough, cough], but we are confident that the care provided to the vast majority of the many thousands of patients who use our service is good [never mind about the few awkward ones where we provide a terrible service, they’re not like ‘us’ and they don’t count]. We have not always got it right [er, slightly minimising what the Trust has done?] and there have been occasions when we have needed to apologise, learn lessons and take steps to address areas of weakness [if I was being mean I’d suggest that that the Trust needing to do these things isn’t the same as them saying they’ve actually done them?].

The quality of our services is under constant scrutiny and review by a variety of regulatory bodies, notably Monitor and the Care Quality Commission [how dare they?]. Inspections of our sites have identified a great deal that is excellent about the Trust [lovely wallpaper]. However, we have also received a number of warning notices and compliance actions which have required the Trust to take immediate changes to address the concerns identified [again, the regulators are the agents here, doing mean things to the poor Trust. No sense that poor practices in the Trust triggered any of this scrutiny? And should we have known about these ‘concerns’ that these outsiders drone on about – of course not!].

As a result of an investigation undertaken in-year, Monitor has agreed to accept enforcement undertakings submitted by the Trust [this is a very oddly constructed sentence – doesn’t say anything about why Monitor imposed an enforcement action, or even that they did this, and it’s constructed in terms of Monitor acceptance of Trust undertakings]; actions to address these will be delivered in 2014/15 [just a blip, nothing to see here, move along].

In the period since Southern Health was formed in April 2011 we have worked with our partners in health, local authorities and the voluntary sector to develop our children’s services and have delivered our plans to implement the national programme for health visiting [nice to talk about children rather than those difficult people causing us trouble]. We have expanded the delivery of our high quality cost effective social care solutions [nice phrasing that will make people’s eyes glaze over, rather than ask why an NHS Trust is expanding its social care services] and developed a number of innovative services to support patients who would otherwise be cared for in inpatient facilities [let’s ignore the fact that some of these inpatient services have been forced to close because they’re so awful]. We have continued to advance our community services [advance? running out of thesaurus options?] , providing integrated physical and mental health for older people, working with partners to support more patients outside of hospital [we’re finding other people to do this because we can’t do it ourselves?]. We have also made good progress redesigning our mental health services, enabling more people to be cared for in the community [we’re closing services and selling off the sites].

Our commissioning arrangements remain complex with seven Clinical Commissioning Groups authorised to take responsibility for commissioning local health services in Hampshire and five Clinical Commissioning Groups responsible for commissioning the non-Hampshire Learning Disability Services we provide in Oxford, Buckinghamshire, Swindon and Wiltshire [there’s the ‘non-Hampshire’ yoked to ‘learning disability’ again]. The NHS Commissioning Board commission primary care and more specialist services (including our forensic services) and Hampshire County Council and Southampton City Council commission health promotion and public health services [see how complicated it is? You couldn’t possibly understand so can’t ask us about it].

During the course of the year we have seen the Trust appoint a new Non-Executive Director, Mr Mike Sadler; Chief Finance Office, Mark Brooks; and an Interim Executive Director of Nursing, Allied Health Professionals and Quality [good to see Quality so central, not like it’s tacked on to someone’s job title or anything], Jude Diggins; all of whom bring with them new ideas and a wealth of experience and enthusiasm and who we welcome to the team.

We have also celebrated success in several areas where staff and teams have been shortlisted and won awards [phew, glad we’ve got that awkward stuff out of the way, let’s talk awards. See, there’s so many! What’s to complain about?] such as:
·         The West Hampshire Community Diabetes Team won the Best IT-Led Initiative at the Quality in Care Awards;
·         The TQTwentyone Team winning the ‘Care Team of the Year’ award at the South East Great British Care Awards 2013;
·         The Mother and Baby (Perinatal) Mental Health Service being named the ‘Psychiatric Team of the Year’ at the national 2013 Royal College of Psychiatrists Awards;
·         The Trust winning the Leadership Innovation category at the Guardian Healthcare Innovation Awards;
·         The Trust being shortlisted for the Provider Trust of the Year; the Creating sustainable NHS Providers and the Board Leadership Award in the Health Service Journal Awards.

Also, in a first for Hampshire [our ‘real’ service, folks], police services in Southampton are piloting a new scheme that puts mental health workers in police patrol cars and control centres. This is in an effort to improve the support available to people in crisis [see, we’re not failing people in crisis, and we’re in-no-vat-ive], and preventing the need to take them into police custody.

Day in, day out staff work tirelessly to deliver excellent care to patients [again, diss us and you diss all our tireless staff, how hurtful and cruel of you], sometimes we get it wrong [again, get it wrong?] but we are all working to truly understand how to deliver improvements [because delivering improvements is really, really, really complicated and its beyond anyone’s understanding – how were we to know?].

Despite the challenges that lie ahead, both foreseen [although we won’t mention what any of them are] and unexpected [those pesky regulators in those non-Hampshire services], our main priorities continue to be on driving up standards of care and giving patients high quality, safe services [so the challenges of the Trust providing some terrible services are getting in the way of the Trust improving their services? Eh?] which improve the health, wellbeing and independence of the people we serve [yep, we’re just the servants here - job done and on to the next awards ceremony].