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Changing lives - our strategy
Changing lives - our strategy
Changing lives - our strategy
Changing lives - our strategy
Our strategy is named ‘Changing Lives’ because everything we do is to help people improve their lives. We know this is what matters to our service users, carers, families, local communities and our passionate staff.
To achieve this we are focused on the quality of our services, but we cannot do this alone. We need to work in partnership with people and communities; make the trust a great place to work to attract and retain the very best people; maximise our ability to innovate; and deliver best value from all of our assets and resources.
Launched in January 2019, our Changing Lives films set out our strategy and follow the journeys of five inspirational service users, Cassie, Kay, Micah, David and Anthony, and their clinicians. See Micah's story here or visit our YouTube channel to see all the Changing Lives films.
As a large, diverse mental health trust providing local and national services, we aim to make a difference to lives by seeking excellence in all areas of mental health and wellbeing: prevention, care, recovery, education and research.
Our Changing Lives strategy sets out five strategic aims to steer our work:
One fundamental shift that we want to make is to change the relationship with service users, carers and families at all levels. We have already made strong progress but we need to support both professionals and service users to take different roles and approaches that will help people change their lives. Our well-established five commitments to build trusting, mutual relationships set us on good course for this.
The Changing Lives strategy builds on our direction of travel, evolving from our previous strategy, but with stronger emphasis on consistent quality, continuous improvement and partnership in its different forms. The strategy is aligned with a wide range of partners including:
We will work with service users, staff and partners to consider the strategy, what it means for them and their contribution to implementing the strategy.
Implementation will have a strong emphasis on quality as our lead aim. Our Improvement Plan from autumn 2018 to spring 2019 will bring together multiple strands and kick-start progress. We will align our strategy with our operating plan for financial year 2019/2020 and 2020/2021 by working closely with our clinical teams, borough and community partners and the IoPPN.
We are immensely grateful to our staff, service users and stakeholders for their insights in steering the direction of the trust.
We are committed to building trusting, mutual relationships with each other and with service users. Our commitments were developed with staff and checked with service users. They are:
We want to make a step change in working collaboratively with service users, carers and families. We will work together with people to plan care, to understand them and their carers, to maximise their control, and bring together services to achieve the outcomes important to them.
We will support people to develop the knowledge, skills and confidence they need to more effectively look after themselves and make informed decisions about their own health and well-being. We recognise adopting person-centred care as ‘business as usual’ requires fundamental changes to how services are delivered and to roles – not only those of health care professionals, but of service users too – and the relationships between service users, professionals and teams. Staff, service users and carers need to recognise that each play a vital role in the wellbeing of the person needing our help and the power imbalance between the three parties needs to be acknowledged and addressed. Genuine co-production will mean that people’s cultural needs will be recognised and met because their assets, needs and wants will be at the heart of what we develop to support them when they have mental health difficulties.
We are working with other organisations to deliver joined up care pathways, for example through the South London Mental Health and Community Partnership, the Lambeth Alliance and work with other boroughs.
Our combined clinical and academic expertise and strength of partnership working means we are in an excellent position to develop leading edge approaches to population health management. We will make better use of routine information to understand our populations and their mental health, so that working with our commissioners, we can plan and design services more effectively and efficiently. We will identify those groups of people who are at risk of adverse health and well-being outcomes and use advanced analytics to predict which individuals are most likely to benefit from different interventions, and then ensure that they are offered services that best meet their needs – constantly looking to lower risk. We will routinely identify missed elements of evidence based care in our pathways of care and ensure that commissioners and partners are informed and work together so gaps are filled. We will enable service users to contribute extra information to allow for more holistic solutions to their needs. These solutions will be co-produced with service users and local partners such as education, community safety, police, leisure, transport, employers, housing and primary care. We will use anonymised information to ensure that we are consistently addressing the inequalities that are faced by many groups.
Through this, working collaboratively with our local partners, we will better focus on prevention, access, early intervention and recovery to improve our reach and impact on people’s lives. To drive primary prevention, we will work with a wide range of partners – schools, the police, local government and housing – developing and sharing the evidence about what works and helping educate people about mental health. We will provide joined up care, close to home and focus on key outcomes that matter to local people.
Embracing partnership working and forging local connections, relationships and partnerships will help develop a collaborative movement to improve life opportunities.
This will build on our existing work in Lambeth where resources have been pooled to prevent long in-patient stays and for older adults in Croydon.
The foundation for all our work is our commitment and success in developing productive strategic partnerships – with our four boroughs, CCGs, South London Partnership, Lambeth Alliance, King’s Health Partners (AHSC), Health Innovation Network (AHSN), Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience (IoPPN) at King’s College London, Maudsley Charity and others.
We will maximise benefit to service users and the local community from our research and development by making it a routine, core part of clinical activities across the organisation - in all professional groups and teams across our geography. We will build on our unique breadth and depth of research and clinical care; many clinical areas already have strong research programmes which inform local, national and international practice. Leading edge big data and digital approaches will allow us to better identify people at risk, spot potential problems, develop new interventions, deliver support and improve care.
We will answer key questions in clinical practice and population health, informing our work in the trust and that of mental health practitioners across the globe. We will continue to undertake research and generate evidence that will lead to ground-breaking discoveries. We will introduce new practices, refined and evaluated through our close clinical academic partnerships to establish evidence-based practice. Our care pathways will be underpinned by research and evidence supporting the highest possible standards of care. We will increase the number of staff involved in research by encouraging and supporting all staff to get involved and take more active roles in leading research and take pride in being part of a research active organisation.
Quality improvement approaches will be used to put evidence-based practice into wider use and to become a true learning organisation and system. Our approach to education and training will support staff to get involved in both research and quality improvement which will help to further develop an ethos of innovation as we develop our workforce and our clinical services.
The Maudsley Charity is one of the larger hospital charities and able to make a significant difference to innovation in the trust. It works closely with our staff to generate ideas that will make a difference to care, treatment and service innovation.
As a trust, our relationship with academic mental health and the world leading reputation of the Maudsley brand in research and innovation is perhaps what we are most known for. As such leaders for mental health, we will use the insight and our voice to improve care nationally and internationally and tackle stigma and discrimination.