Performance review 2024 to 2025

About us

South West London and St George’s Mental Health NHS Trust (SWLSTG) provides mental health and learning disability services for 1.2 million people across the London boroughs of Kingston, Merton, Richmond, Sutton, and Wandsworth.

We are a 2,900-strong team providing high-quality mental health and learning disability care, treatment and recovery support to about 40,000 people from South West London and beyond at any given moment. We are proud to be one of the most diverse organisations in the NHS, and we are working together to create an organisation in which we all belong and one which celebrates our diversity and promotes equity. 

We are strongly committed to putting active anti-racism, co-production and quality improvement at the centre of everything we do.

As a leading provider of mental health services and a beacon of excellence for many national mental health services, the Trust has a long history of innovation that has helped to redefine the mental health landscape in the UK. 

We have grown the services we offer, and now have more than 120 clinical teams working across four service lines that make sure high-quality patient-centred care is our priority:

• Acute and Urgent Care Services.
• Community Services (for adults primarily of working age).
• Child and Adolescent Mental Health (CAMHS) and All Age Eating Disorders Services.
• Specialist Services (including Forensic, National, and Cognition and Mental Health in Ageing Services).

Services have been provided from Springfield University Hospital in Tooting for more than 160 years. In 2022 and 2023, we opened the brand-new Trinity and Shaftesbury Buildings at Springfield University Hospital, which include eight inpatient wards, outpatient services and teaching and learning facilities. These buildings sit at the centre of Springfield Village, a new stigma-breaking community comprising mental health facilities, hundreds of new homes, shops, cafés and a 32-acre park. 

We also provide inpatient services from Tolworth Hospital in Kingston, where we have started a £110m redevelopment to replace five wards over the next few years. Over the last two years, we have grown our services; for example, we now operate Talking Therapies services across our five boroughs. We also offer community services in locations across South West London. We provide community and outpatient services in each of the boroughs we serve, and our community sites at Richmond Royal and Barnes Hospitals are also seeing significant redevelopment. We also provide many specialist services such as national and regional Deaf services (including community provision), intellectual disabilities and autism services, and services for people with eating disorders and obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD).

Over the years, mental health services, philosophies and treatment have radically changed, and today we are an innovative and forward-thinking mental health provider. Through our Better Communities Programme, we are investing in: Better Care (transforming our children and young people and adult community and urgent and acute services); Better Environments (transforming our buildings) to reduce health inequalities and mental health stigma and provide outstanding facilities and services in which our patients can receive care and our teams can develop and Better Digital. Taken as a whole, the Better Communities Programme represents a significant investment in our local communities and will create a truly sustainable future for mental health services in South West London. 

Our services emphasise recovery, which means supporting people to get on with their lives and to focus on the things that are important to them. Reflecting our holistic approach to providing effective mental health services, we launched the first Recovery College in 2010, and it was the first of its kind in the UK. We were also the first mental health Trust to offer meaningful employment support in primary and secondary services, recognising the link between employment and good mental health. 

Our staff are among some of the most advanced and experienced practitioners in their fields, and we are proud of their services' positive impact on patients and the wider community. We embrace new roles and have developed and recruited for several innovative new clinical and non-clinical positions. We invest in research, innovation and training in mental health and are connected to several academic and research organisations.

As a teaching Trust, we also provide education, training and research in partnership with several universities, including City St George’s, University of London, Kingston University London, London South Bank University, King’s College London, University of Surrey, the Tavistock Institute of Medical Psychology and Brunel University London. Our affiliated university is City St George’s, University of London, who have the right to nominate a non-executive director for our Board.

We ensure that co-production is at the heart of what we do, working hand in hand with patients, carers, volunteers, Peer Support Workers, and our communities. As part of this, we are proud to be one of only 20 mental health Trusts in the country to become stage 2 members of the Triangle of Care, which recognises the efforts that have been made to improve carer support. We are committed to doing even more.

We also engage in partnership through our South West London Integrated Care System (ICS), at ‘place’ in each of our five boroughs and as part of the groundbreaking South London Mental Health and Community Partnership (SLP) alongside Oxleas NHS Foundation Trust and South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust (SLaM), concentrating on collaboration to enhance quality, outcomes, and efficiency. This ensures that highly specialised care is delivered as close to home as possible.

Our mission, values and strategic ambitions

Our Trust's mission remains ‘Making Life Better Together’. We aim to help patients maintain and regain control of their lives, and develop and attain opportunities, roles, relationships and activities that are important to them. By putting patients at the heart of our organisation, we want to break down barriers that prevent people from seeking support and become the first choice for mental health care for more people within our local communities.

We have five core values that outline how we behave and work with external stakeholders, partners, and colleagues. We have further developed these values to make clear our commitment to active anti-racism.

Our Trust Strategy 

Our Trust Strategy was intended to cover five years (from 2018 to 2023). The onset of the Covid-19 pandemic meant that we had to rethink original delivery plans, shifting our focus to supporting and protecting patients and staff. Our strategic work had to pause.

Towards the end of the pandemic, we began to plan how to focus on longer-term issues once more. To support this, we reviewed progress against our Trust Strategy 5-year ambitions and outcomes. This year, we looked again at a comprehensive set of data mapped against our strategic ambitions. We also reviewed the work programmes and held some stakeholder feedback sessions.

The review highlighted that while we have seen improvement in key areas (for example, we have seen more of our services rated as having a ‘Good’ CQC rating and have seen improvements in physical health and co-production and involvement), we have seen less progress in other areas. We have begun to embed work to reduce inequalities and are still improving our organisation for our staff. We have opened new, modern hospitals and clinical facilities and still need to enhance some of our services further.

In light of this, in autumn 2023 and spring 2025, our Board reaffirmed its commitment to our four strategic ambitions and thereby extended the life of our Strategy by at least two years, with annual progress reviews to be conducted.

The strategy focuses explicitly on delivering improved outcomes and:

• Increasing quality years 
• Reducing inequalities 
• Making the Trust a great place to work 
• Ensuring sustainability.

We have agreed on several enabling strategies (for example, the Quality Strategy, People Strategy, Communications and Engagement Strategy) that include specific details regarding delivery in those areas. These strategies are subject to annual implementation plans, which are reviewed each year to ensure effective implementation.

Organisational Annual Delivery Plans (ADPs) are developed each year to support the implementation of the Trust Strategy.

In developing these, the Trust considers several key factors, including performance from the previous year, current pressures and challenges, our capacity, and the external environment.

Every year, we aim to establish realistic yet ambitious targets that will support our ongoing development.

Following feedback from our patients, carers, and staff (including our diverse Executive Advisory Group), we agreed to concentrate on a smaller number of high-impact areas and to communicate these clearly throughout our organisation.

The effort to achieve these priorities is expected to extend over several years, reflecting the complexity of some challenges we encounter.

In May 2024, the Trust Board approved the 2024/25 priorities, which focus on two areas that offer opportunities to tackle our greatest challenges regarding flow through our adult services and our workforce. These are:

·        Improving our Adult Patient Journey: To enhance access, experience, and outcomes in our adult services by providing a smooth, digitally enabled, and prompt patient journey with the best and least restrictive intervention when necessary, delivering improved, equitable recovery and outcomes.

·        Making the Trust a Great Place to Work: To deliver quality services by having an exceptional and stable workforce that reflects the communities we serve and feels valued with support for development of skills and careers within the Trust.

As with previous years, there are also enabling Annual Delivery Plans to support the delivery of these top priorities. For 2024/25, these were:

·        Better Care: To enable service users to experience care as close to home as possible, with a focus on recovery and outcomes

·        Better Environments: To provide state-of-the-art mental health facilities, improving access and outcomes and reinvigorating working practices for staff and service users alike

·        Partnerships: To develop partnerships and act as a system leader, driving strategic improvements to the mental health of the local population

·        Sustainability: To continue to work towards financial and operational sustainability, supporting best value and efficiency in health and care.

The top two priorities map to all four of the Trust’s strategic ambitions, effectively acting as work programmes for those ambitions. The four ADPs are enablers of all four strategic ambitions.

Key work and delivery items have been outlined with the intended timescales for each priority and enabling ADP of work. Key outcomes or metrics have been developed to enable monitoring. Where available, data have been broken down by ethnicity in support of our overall approach of understanding health inequalities.

Although implementation is led by the Chief Strategy Officer and guided by a diverse steering group comprising patients, carers, and external stakeholders, everyone within our organisation works to realise our ambitions.