Avon and Wiltshire Mental Health Partnership NHS Trust

On this page

• Overview
• Shared direction and culture
• Capable, compassionate and inclusive leaders
• Freedom to speak up
• Workforce equality, diversity and inclusion
• Governance, management and sustainability
• Partnerships and communities
• Learning, improvement and innovation

Leadership across the service was consistent, managers knew their service well and understood the strengths and challenges. Staff reported feeling valued and teams we visited all stated they could speak openly to their managers without fear of reprisal. Leaders shared concerns across the whole service and implemented agreed strategies in collaboration with other service managers.

All managers we spoke to emphasised on the importance of providing high quality care and knew how to utilise the resources they had to promote this.

Feedback from staff showed good relations and understanding of roles and responsibilities of leaders at local level. However, not all staff understood or felt the involvement or influence of senior leaders within the trust.

This service scored 75 (out of 100) for this area. Find out what we look at when we assess this area and How we calculate these scores.

Staff across all levels and disciplines described a positive culture and shared direction for their service. Staff were passionate about the work they did and spoke about a shared vision to provide person-centred, recovery-focused care to patients. Staff showed awareness of the trust’s values.

Senior leaders update and refresh with the vision and path of direction on a monthly basis.

Leaders shared an implementation plan called “Your Team- Your Conversation – Your Plan” with aim being “It is hoped that adopting a simple approach that produces a simple plan will free staff time to concentrate on building relationships, communicating effectively and delivering meaningful interventions.”

Leaders had the skills, knowledge and experience to perform their roles. Leaders had a good understanding of the services they managed and the current challenges they faced.

Staff described having inclusive leaders who understood the context in which care, treatment and support is delivered. Leaders embody the culture and values of their workforce and organisation. They have the skills, knowledge, experience and credibility to lead effectively. They do so with integrity, openness and honesty.

Team managers gave examples how trust policies for performance management had been utilised to support staff who required it. This evidenced that leaders were able to be compassionate and tailor ways of working with staff who required support and tailored adjustments in order to fulfil their role effectively.

Most staff knew how to contact the trust’s Freedom to Speak Up Guardian and what this process involved. Those who didn’t know the process knew how they would find the information if needed. No staff we spoke with, raised any significant concerns regarding management or trust senior leaders but were aware of how to contact CQC and the whistleblowing process. Staff felt able to speak up without a fear of retribution.

The trust had processes in place for staff to raise concerns to a Speak Up Guardian.

Staff felt valued and described an inclusive and fair culture.

Staff complete Equality, Diversity and Human rights training as a statutory training module.

The trust has networks such as the faith network and the LGBTQ network to support people who identify as belonging to these groups. There is also a bank Equality, Diversity and Inclusion network for bank staff.

Staff explained how they acted upon and share relevant information for people. They explained the importance of data protection whilst ensuring patient safety was the overarching concern. Leaders understood the resource needs of their locality and explained how the trust could achieve this to provide continuous high quality care to meet the needs of the local populations.

The service had a regular quality and standards meetings, which also included the community mental health services. These meetings were held in each locality, such as. Bristol, North Somerset and South Gloucester. Each meeting discussed key clinical governance issues such as reviewing and learning from incidents and complaints, reviewing service risks, safeguarding concerns and policy updates. These meetings also reviewed and logged actions from previous meetings. The service also held learning from excellence meetings to discuss and share learning from incidents. Information from both these meetings are shared within the senior leader’s meetings and team meetings.

People raised no concerns regarding this quality statement.

Staff told us about strong working relationships with the local authority, with some teams sharing offices with them and aligned working arrangements. Staff at various localities spoke about the importance of utilising local initiatives/groups the patients could benefit from, aiding their recovery.

As part of routine monitoring of the service, the integrated care board (ICB) had raised no concerns to the commission in relation to this quality statement.

Managers engaged actively other local health and social care providers to ensure that an integrated health and care system was commissioned and provided to meet the needs of the local population. Managers from the service participated actively in the work of the local transforming care partnership.

Staff described a positive learning and improvement culture that had improved since the last inspection. Staff had attended team away days which covered a variety of learning topics.

We saw examples of learning, improvement and innovation in different locations. For example, one quality improvement project (CT1) was aimed at training people in clozapine management which had also been rolled out to external organisations.

One locality also implemented a wellbeing clinic which included patients taking part in a 12 week programme including aspects of healthy living, meds management. This included people receiving a pedometer and watches to compliment the healthy living course and management of symptoms. People were able to keep the equipment following graduation of the course. This was an initiative that we were told was aimed at being rolled out across other locations of the trust.