Inspection and Regulation

Fiona Dougherty-Price   25/09/2013 at 16:10

There have been governance problems with this Trust for 'many' years. I resigned from the Governing body in 2010 for several reasons..... *One was the tragic death of a service user and the fact it could have been prevented as a patient had already alerted the Trust about inadequate responses from the crisis team (in 2007) the service users concerns werent acted upon they were totally ignored. *Concerns about the attitude of some of the Trust's non executive directors-they werent sufficiently challenging to the Executive. *One of the Trust's non executive directors aggressively shouted me down at a Governors meeting when I raised the subject of performance managing staff using the CORE measurement tool. *The medical director (and head of psychology) had written discriminatory remarks about types of patients in a text book ('hateful patients' ,'dependent clingers','help rejecting complainers' etc) and when I showed the references to a Non Exec Director he said.... "well they were writing for fellow professionals it wasnt meant to be seen by the patients" I regarded his attitude as unacceptable and not appropriate especially with regard to the fact the Trust was supposed to be leading 'Time For Change'. *The Board of Directors including the Non Executive Directors 'refused' to have a service user on their Board Of Directors despite stating in their 'Guide to Services' that they had service user involvement at all levels in the Trust. The Council of Governors is an ineffective farce its nothing more than a talking shop. I was hopeful at first that there would be a cultural shift and the Trust would become increasingly 'patient led' however there was very strong resistance from both senior management and the non-executive directors, they liked things as they were. Most of the governors are non-committal and apathetic and not sufficiently informed with regard to mental health and learning disability matters. Governors input isnt regarded as important because decisions have already been made and the governors are just there to rubberstamp them meetings are directed to pre-set conclusions and most of the governors dont even realise Bournemouth and Poole Foundation Trusts attract high calibre governors but Dorset Health Care Foundation Trust are finding it difficult to attract suitable individuals,there was hardly anyone interested in applying to stand in their latest elections.