Improving the health and lives of the communities we serve: from 2025 to 2030

Our new five-year strategy has landed . . . but as our Chief Executive Dr Sara Munro explains, we need your help to keep it alive!

I am delighted to present our new five-year strategy. This is a summary document for anyone interested in where we are now, where we want to be, and how we plan to get there.

It aims to provide an accessible overarching narrative that summarises our longer-term vision and how we’ll achieve it - following our five core strategic plans. As a reminder, they are (in alphabetical order):

1.??? Care Services Strategic Plan,??????

2.??? Digital Plan,?

3.??? Estates Strategic Plan (new version to be ratified March 2025),

4.??? People Plan, and

5.??? Quality strategic Plan.

You can find all these documents on the strategy page of our website.

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Why this is important

I am privileged to lead such a committed and talented organisation of people who work tirelessly all year round to provide great care, or who provide the conditions for great care to happen.

Why is our work important? Because we know that even in a modern developed country like ours, people who need help for their mental health, people with learning disabilities and those with neurodiverse conditions endure inequalities which affects their health and lives. For example, we know that:

• People in the most deprived parts of Leeds, where we provide most of our services, on average die 10 years younger than those in the least deprived areas.
• People with serious mental illness die on average 15 to 20 years earlier than the general population.
• Women with a learning disability die 27 years younger than the rest of the population; and for men its 23 years younger.
• People with a learning disability are 3 to 4 times as likely to die from an avoidable medical cause of death.
• People with neurodiverse conditions struggle to access the services and treatments they need in a timely manner – leading to poorer health and life opportunities.

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National strategy direction

At the time of writing, the government is developing a new 10-year strategy for health. This will set out how it will achieve its three strategic shifts of:

1. Hospital to community,

2. Treatment to prevention, and

3. Analogue to digital.

You’ll see references to all three of those shifts in our strategy.

Once completed it will set out expectations of the NHS, and what is possible within its scope, informed by Lord Darzi’s review published in September 2024. We expect it to be published in Spring 2025, at which time we will review our plans to ensure they align.

In the meantime, the message is clear – there will be no new money without reform, and we need to deliver on the operational priorities for this year within the resources we already have.

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How you can help us keep it alive

Strategy documents are great for setting vision and objectives at a certain point in time. The harder job is to keep them relevant for the longer term. The risk is they sit on a shelf, digitally and physically, gathering dust.

Our Communications Team wants to keep our strategy alive by telling the stories of the people who are delivering against this strategy, now and over the next five years.

This could be anyone, in any role, of any seniority, across the entire breadth of the Trust. It could also include our partners whom we work with to deliver services, and involve our service users and carers who will be able to share how it feels to be on the receiving end of our plans.

They’ve created this quick and simple form which captures some basic details. If you have a story to share on how we are delivering our strategy, then please get in touch. If you’ve got any questions please reach out to them.

I look forward to working with you all to improve the health and lives of the communities we serve together.