Lobby NSFT Board of Governors Meeting: Thursday 8th January 2015, 1230, City Hall, Norwich NR2 1NH

Suffolk Circle scandal

We will be lobbying the Norfolk & Suffolk NHS Foundation Trust (NSFT) Board of Governors meeting tomorrow. Meet at 1230 on the City Hall steps. Some of us will also be attending the meeting which runs from 1300-1700 in the Council Chamber. Please join us.

Despite mountains of paperwork, detailed terms of reference and long meetings, the Board of Governors has failed in its duty to properly represent service users, carers, staff and public, of which the most damning consequence is the need for our campaign itself.

The NSFT Board of Governors has failed in its duty to hold the NSFT Board to account. Good corporate governance is not about whether issues are noted or placed on a register: it is about whether anything is done. Good corporate governance is not about box-ticking meetings: it is about results. The results at NSFT have been the slashing of mental health services to some of the most vulnerable, patients transported across the country at tremendous personal and financial cost, a complete collapse in staff morale and a financial meltdown which threatens the very existence of the trust. We gave detailed presentations to the Board of Governors back in April 2014, but our warnings were dismissed or ignored. Now, NSFT is under investigation by the CQC and Monitor and its community services have been rated the worst in England.

While the Board of Governors is led by Guenever Pachent, whose natural inclination is to offer unconditional support to the Board rather than to welcome challenge and maintain a professional distance, the Board of Governors will not deliver. The culture will not improve while elected volunteer governors are constrained by the unelected and overpaid Trust Secretary, Robert Nesbitt, who wasted thousands of pounds of NHS funds exploring legal action against our campaign, has advised governors not to join us or attend our meetings and pressed governors who openly support us to declare their ‘incompatible’ support for our campaign on the Governors’ Register of Interests.

Join us tomorrow.

8 thoughts on “Lobby NSFT Board of Governors Meeting: Thursday 8th January 2015, 1230, City Hall, Norwich NR2 1NH”

  1. Let me get this straight… Suffolk County Council blew £700,000 on a harebrained scheme which undermined existing voluntary sector provision and failed and then they tried to keep it quiet? And the current NSFT Lead Governor is named as the Service Director at Suffolk County Council on the project documents they tried to keep secret? And NSFT tried its own ‘radical redesign’ project which failed, blew millions of pounds on redundancies which they tried to keep quiet and is now under investigation by Monitor…

  2. Perhaps the governors could hold meetings at times when people who work or have families could attend? Perhaps they could stop holding meetings in the middle of nowhere where you must own a car to attend? Perhaps if they got get rid of all the pointless bureaucratic nonsense and actually discussed important issues, they might get better recruits and be of more use?

    It beggars belief that, given the catastrophic failure of the radical redesign and Monitor’s concerns about governance issues, they feel they are doing a good job. Currently, the Board of Governors meetings are more like a posh game of buzzword bingo. You could call it Norfolk & Suffolk Circle. They couldn’t be more out of touch. The governors received plenty of warnings but gave unconditional backing to the Board, becoming nothing more than window-dressing for the disastrous TSS.

    Pachent has to go. Not only because of her sycophancy but also because somebody has to take responsibility for the breakdown in governance, the lives lost and the millions wasted.

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