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.