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

This means we looked for evidence that service leadership, management and governance assured high-quality, person-centred care; supported learning and innovation; and promoted an open, fair culture.

At our last assessment we rated this key question Good. At this assessment the rating has remained Good.

Good: This meant the service was consistently managed and well-led. Leaders and the culture they created promoted high-quality, person-centred care.

We rated this key question good because:

• Staff were committed to providing high quality care in line with the trust’s values.
• Managers were approachable and listened to staff’s opinions.
• The trust actively encouraged feedback about the service from young people, their families and staff.
• There were clear governance process in place.
• The service was committed to innovation in clinical practice.

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 we spoke to knew the providers vision and values of passion, respect, integrity, diversity, excellence (PRIDE). Managers had communicated these values to the teams.

Staff we spoke to were committed to providing a high-quality service that met the needs of the young people they cared for. Staff could explain to us how they were working to provide high-quality care. For example, staff told us about the paediatric monitoring clinic. Staff developed the paediatric monitoring clinic to improve the young person’s access to blood tests, weight monitoring, and ECGs. This avoided the need to contact GPs for these services and enabled same-day results. A paediatric registrar oversaw the clinic.

The staff and managers we spoke to demonstrated that they had the skills, experience and knowledge for their roles. There were systems in place that allowed managers to review the services performance and looked to improve the service. For example, the introduction of the paediatric monitoring clinic.

Staff told us that managers were approachable and listened to staff. Staff told us that managers worked with them to identify training and development opportunities including leadership development.

Staff told us that they rarely saw directors of the trust at the service.

Young people and their families had the opportunity to give feedback about the service. Staff gave people information on how to complain, there were QR codes on the wall that people could scan to leave feedback, and the trust website explained the ways they collected feedback.

Staff could feedback about the service during supervision session or team meetings. The trust employed a Freedom to Speak Up Guardian and a team of Freedom to Speak Up Ambassadors, who could help staff raise concerns.

Managers would make themselves available to the young people, their families and staff that wanted to discuss concerns with them.

The trust had a diversity and inclusion policy that identified how they expected the staff to work with young people from diverse cultural backgrounds. It also told staff what they should expect from the trust. For example, equal opportunities for promotion.

The trust had processes in place to monitor their workforce in line with national guidance.

The trust had set priorities in relation to the NHS Patient Carer Race Equality Framework (PCREF). This included improving staff knowledge of anti-racism and cultural safety and improving the recording of protected characteristics and ethnicity in the electronic records.

There was a clear governance process in place that allowed staff and managers to find issues and address them. The local governance system fed into the wider trusts process. The managers attended a monthly Safe, Effective Experience CAMHS Oversight Group meeting which allowed them to measure the teams’ performance and make changes to address any concerns. For example, managers identified that not all risk information was up to date on the electronic computer system, so managers worked with staff teams to ensure risk information was up to date and visible to teams who need it.

However, the local safeguarding meeting had not taken place in the North Somerset Team as the manager was not at work.

Senior managers made themselves available to the young people, their families and other organisations if they wanted to discuss the care they provided and give feedback to the service.

The service was committed to quality improvement (QI) and there was a process in place for requesting to start a QI project. At the time of our inspection there were 22 QI projects in place, these included an evaluation of reflective practice groups, transition projects and parents’ groups.

The trust conducted regular internal reviews of their services to identify areas of improvement against the regulations in the Health and Social Care Act.