12/11/20
A message from Brent Kilmurray, our chief executive:
It’s been a few weeks since the latest phase of Our Big Conversation closed and I want to start by saying a HUGE thank you to everyone who contributed.
We launched Our Big Conversation in August asking people across Teesside, County Durham, Darlington, North Yorkshire and York to share their views to help improve the quality of mental health and learning disability services we provide for service users, carers and families.
I’m absolutely committed to ensuring that everyone receives the best possible care and support from us. Therefore our conversation over the last few months has really focused on:
- The sort of behaviours that you should expect from everyone who works here
- The vision for the organisation
- The goals we should be working towards
- Some key things we must get in place to make a new future possible.
An independent team is now analysing all of the ideas, insights and experiences you’ve shared with us and we’ll be able to give you more details over the coming weeks. However, I wanted to share some of the early analysis, to explain the next steps and to let you know how you can continue to get involved.
What we’ve heard
A total of 2,183 colleagues, service users, carers and stakeholders have joined Our Big Conversation, and together shared over 35,800 ideas, comments and votes. I’m delighted that so any people took the time to be involved. But this conversation has always been so much more than numbers and I’m even more touched by some of the experiences – both good and bad – that people have shared with us. I understand that sharing your experiences isn’t always easy to do. But please do know that this will help us to make real, meaningful changes. And I genuinely believe that this is just the start – there are plenty more conversations we need to have!
I’d like to share one of the comments that we received from a colleague which for me really highlights one of the reasons we started this conversation:
..I’d like to say thank you to the service users who have highlighted the issues. You are the people that matter. You are the reason I do my job…I absolutely believe that people want to do a good job. I hope that this platform is the first step to meaningful change – that is implemented sooner rather than later. Please don’t give up people do care!
The next steps
The next steps really fall into two categories – how what you’ve told us will influence our trust business plan and our future direction (so some pretty big, long term stuff!) and there’s also the things that we can start doing now.
This week our leadership team, along with a number of service users, carers and external stakeholders joined together (virtually) at a planning event to consider all of the analysis. Our aim is to look at how everything that you’ve shared in the conversation can help us to shape our purpose and vision, set our priorities and goals and our values and behaviours. I’ll update with you all after these planning days.
As part of Our Big Conversation we also asked for thoughts, ideas and insights on some things that we could start to action now. There were some specific ideas and comments about some of our services, particularly from people who use them, which we’re keen to progress. There were some common themes including leadership, workplace culture and service developments. Again, we’ll be able to provide some more detailed information on this in the next few weeks.
This has been the biggest listening exercise that we’ve ever done here at our trust – and we’ve read every piece of feedback. I also want to make sure that this is just the start of our conversations to help us to shape the future of our trust together and we’ll be looking at more ways we can involve even more people as we continue this journey.
Thank you once again,
Brent
Brent Kilmurray
Chief executive