The Joint Health Overview and Scrutiny Committee was scheduled to meet to discuss the North London NHS Foundation Trust (NLFT) Quality Account for 2024-2025. The Quality Account is an annual report providing an overview of the quality of care delivered by the Trust’s mental health and community services. The report pack contains a draft version of the Quality Account, and notes that feedback from the JHOSC was scheduled to be added prior to publication of the final version.

North London Foundation Trust Quality Account 2024-25

The committee was scheduled to discuss the North London Foundation Trust's Quality Account for 2024-25. The Quality Account is designed to reflect on the quality of services delivered, demonstrate commitment to improvement, show progress against identified priorities, highlight areas needing improvement, and outline key quality priorities for the coming year.

The report pack states that the Quality Account is useful because:

it provides transparency by allowing patients, their families, staff, and the wider community to understand how NLFT is performing in terms of mental health services through the provision of key metrics.

North London Foundation Trust Quality Account 2024-2025

The report pack highlights the formation of the North London NHS Foundation Trust (NLFT) on 1 November 2024, which brought together the former Barnet, Enfield and Haringey Mental Health Trust and Camden and Islington NHS Foundation Trust. The report pack states that the merger was intended to enhance mental health services across Barnet, Enfield, Haringey, Camden, and Islington. The report pack also introduces The North London Way, a new initiative designed to align values, culture, and approach to care across NLFT services.

The report pack also identifies four quality priorities for 2024-25:

• Implementing Culture of Care standards across in-patient services to improve person-centred approaches to care.
• Working in partnership across North London to ensure equity of outcome.
• Offering great places to work, providing staff with a supportive environment to deliver excellent care.
• Becoming more effective as an organisation by pioneering research, Quality Improvement and Technology.

The report pack also sets out the proposed quality priorities for 2025-26:

• Continuing to learn and develop as an organisation from patient and carer feedback.
• Ensuring patients receive support in a therapeutic and safe environment.
• Offering great places to work, providing staff with a supportive environment to deliver excellent care.
• Providing consistently high quality care, closer to home.

The report pack also contains information on:

• The Trust's participation in national audits and confidential inquiries.
• The local clinical audit programme.
• Implementation of NICE (National Institute for Health and Care Excellence) guidance.
• Participation in clinical research.
• Participation in accreditation schemes.
• Performance measurement, including average length of stay for acute wards, out of area placements, occupied bed days, first episode of psychosis, memory services access, talking therapies, child and adolescent mental health services, specialist perinatal mental health service, adult secure access assessments, 72-hour follow-up, and liaison emergency department response rate.
• Information governance, including data security and protection.
• Patient experience, including concerns and complaints.
• Patient safety, including patient safety incidents and learning from deaths.
• Infection prevention and control.
• The annual staff survey.
• Equality, diversity and inclusion.
• Organisational development.
• Quality governance.
• Safeguarding.