Our 28 promises

Promises 1 to 5

Nurture partnerships with patients and citizens to support good health.

1. Employ peer support workers at the heart of every service that we offer by 2027.
2. Support unpaid carers in our communities and among our staff, developing the resilience of neighbourhoods to improve healthy life expectancy.
3. Work with over 350 volunteers by 2025 to go the extra mile in the quality of care that we offer.
4. Put patient feedback at the heart of how care is delivered in the trust, encouraging all staff to shape services around individuals’ diverse needs.
5. From 2024, systematically involve our communities at every level of decision making in our trust throughout the year, extending our membership offer and delivering the annual priorities set by our staff and public governors.

Promises 6 to 12

Create equity of access, employment and experience to address differences in outcome.

6. Poverty proof all our services by 2025 to tackle discrimination, including through digital exclusion.
7. Deliver all ten health improvements made in the Core20PLUS5 programme to address healthcare inequalities among children and adults: achieving 95% coverage of health checks for citizens with serious mental illness and those with learning disabilities from 2024.
8. Research, create and deliver five impactful changes to inequalities faced by our population in accessing and benefitting from our autism, learning disability and mental health services as part of our wider drive to tackle inequality (the RDaSH 5).
9. Consistently exceed our apprentice levy requirements from 2025, and implement from 2024 specific tailored programmes of employment access focused on refugees, citizens with learning disabilities, care leavers and those from other excluded communities.
10. Be recognised by 2027 as an outstanding provider of inclusion health care, implementing national institute for health and care excellence (NICE) and NHS England (NHSE) guidance in full, in support of local Gypsy, Roma and travellers (GRT), sex workers, prisoners, people experiencing homelessness and misusing substances, and forced migrants.
11. Deliver in full the NHS commitment to veterans and those within our service communities, recognising the specific needs many have, especially for access to suitable mental health and trauma response services.
12. Work with community organisations and primary care teams to better recognise and respond to the specific needs of the rural communities and villages that we serve.

Promises 13 to 17

Extend our community offer, in each of and between physical, mental health, learning disability, autism and addiction services.

13. Substantially increase our home first ethos which seeks to integrate physical and mental health provision to support residents to live well in their household, children’s home or care home, including older adults.
14. Assess people referred urgently inside 48 hours from 2025 (or under four where required) and deliver a four-week maximum wait for all referrals from April 2026, maximising the use of technology and digital innovation to support our transformation.
15. Support the delivery of effective integrated neighbourhood teams within each of our places in 2024 as part of our wider effort to deliver parity of esteem between physical and mental health needs.
16. Focus on collating, assessing and comparing the outcomes that our services deliver, which matter to local people, and investing in improving those outcomes year on year.
17. Embed our child and psychological health teams alongside schools, early years and nursery providers to help tackle poor educational and school readiness and structural inequalities.

Promises 18 to 23

Help deliver social value with local communities through outstanding partnerships with neighbouring local organisations.

18. From 2023 invest, support and research the best models of therapeutic multi-disciplinary inpatient care, increasingly involving those with lived experience and expert carers in supporting our patients’ recovery.
19. End out of area placements in 2024, as part of supporting people to be cared for as close to home as is safely possible.
20. Deliver virtual care models in our mental and physical health services by 2025, providing a high quality alternative to prolonged admission.
21. Actively support local primary care networks and voluntary sector representatives to improve the coordination of care provided to local residents, developing services on a hyper local basis.
22. Develop consistent seven day a week service models across our intermediate care, mental health wards and hospice models from 2025 in order to improve quality of care.
23. Invest in residential care projects and programmes that support long-term care outside our wards, specifically supporting expansion of community forensic, step-down and step-up services.

Promises 24 to 28

Deliver high quality and therapeutic bed-based care on our own sites and in other settings.

24. Expand and improve our educational offer at undergraduate and postgraduate level, as part of supporting existing and new roles within services and teams while delivering the NHS long term workforce plan.
25. Achieve living wage accreditation by 2025, whilst transitioning significantly more of our spend to local suppliers in our communities.
26. Become an anti-racist organisation by 2025, as part of a wider commitment to fighting discrimination and positively promoting inclusion.
27. Deliver the NHS green plan and match commitments made by our local authorities to achieve net zero, whilst adapting our service models to climate change.
28. Extend the scale and reach of our research work every year, creating partnerships with industry and universities that bring investment and employment to our local community.

Page last reviewed: January 22, 2024
Next review due: January 22, 2025