26th June 2014: Help us oppose the NSFT Board’s five year plan for further ‘savings’ of £44.1 million, 200 more job losses and more reorganisations and chaos

Norfolk & Suffolk NHS Foundation Trust (NSFT) Chair, Gary Page, is too busy watching the football in sunny Brazil to attend the next public Board of Directors meeting at The Green Britain Centre (formerly Eco-Tech) in Swaffam on Thursday, 26th June 2014. But it is vital that we attend.

Join us to oppose the rubber stamping of the trust’s just-published and amateurish strategic plan which outlines further ‘savings’ of £44.1 million to mental health services over the next five years and at least an additional 200 job losses, staff pay rises frozen at one per cent until 2019 and further de-skilling and downbanding of the workforce.

The plan doesn’t address the beds or community crises, proposes more chaotic organisational changes and a Walter-Mitty-esque scheme of megalomaniacal expansion, taking over local community trusts and neighbouring mental health trusts despite whatever the public, local commissioners and Monitor want. The plan also appears to have a massive black hole of millions of pounds of unidentified cost savings (i.e. further service and job cuts) and seems to propose weakening Suffolk’s voice in the provision of mental health services. NSFT isn’t even pretending that this new round of massive cuts are ‘clinically-led.’ Because they aren’t.

Join us on Thursday at 9 a.m. to demonstrate outside the meeting and then join us inside to challenge the plan from 9.30 a.m. There is a map below. If you need, or can offer, a lift, let us know. Sorry about the short notice but the agenda and papers, detailing the plan to rubber-stamp the five year plan, have only just been published by the trust. Please join us if you can and pass on the details of this action.