SWLSTG annual report and accounts 2024 to 2025
We are pleased to introduce this year’s annual report, and we would like to begin by offering our thanks to our patients, their families and carers, our staff, and our partners across the community. Your support, resilience and dedication have been vital in helping us continue our mission of Making Life Better Together.
We have once again seen much change, not just within our communities, but across the NHS and beyond. Societal change - including inequality, economic pressure, and world events - can have a profound impact on people’s mental health and wellbeing, and our services must continue to respond with compassion, equity and understanding.
We remain focused on the national priorities for mental health: improving access to both crisis and urgent care, and children’s and young people’s mental health services. We fully support the three shifts outlined by the new Government, from hospital to community, from analogue to digital and from treatment to prevention. Through continuous quality improvement and co-production and co-design, our patients, carers, local community and staff are always at the centre of how we deliver these changes.
Over the year, we have made important progress across our top two priorities.
Our Adult Patient Journey work has focused on multi-disciplinary working across our acute and urgent care and adult community teams to improve care for patients. Using a quality improvement approach, we have significantly reduced the number of adult acute patients in out-of-area beds, which are often far from home and away from loved ones. In addition, we have made progress in safely reducing our longest inpatient stays. Keeping people in restrictive environments for too long does not support recovery, and it disproportionately affects people from Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic backgrounds.
During the year, our teams worked to innovate and continuously improve their services, focusing particularly on reducing health inequalities. Our Perinatal Team launched their new Perinatal Trauma and Loss Team and improved access amongst Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic families. We developed new virtual reality technology to support patients with psychosis, and our new ‘Friendly Ward’ course supported those carers who had loved ones in hospital. We took our commitment to equity even further this year, with our Board agreeing to an ambitious Health Inequalities Strategic Plan, which places racial equity at the core of our work, acknowledging that systemic barriers have led to poorer access, experience, and outcomes in mental health care. The hard work now is to consistently deliver on our commitments.
Through Great Place to Work, we have seen significant improvements in our staff vacancy and turnover rates, both of which have now been at their lowest levels for five years. This means that patients are receiving more consistent care. Our staff also say that their experience at work is improving and that care is our top priority, according to our staff survey. The creation of our Making Life Better Together Development Centre has helped teams across the organisation strengthen their effectiveness, multi-disciplinary working, and psychological safety.
We have also taken further steps on our journey to become actively anti-racist - and yet we know we still have a long way to go. Our Executive Advisory Group, which supports diversity in decision making, has gone from strength to strength, supporting our work to hone our organisational priorities, health inequalities work, and patient and staff experience.
The challenge of balancing quality, finance and performance is ever present. And the work that we have done has supported us in improving quality of care and patient and staff experience, while also improving our financial sustainability. We ended the year meeting our financial targets - an important milestone given the broader economic challenges across the NHS and health and social care.
Our priorities for the year ahead will be to deliver Great Care through the further development of Adult Patient Journey and improving access to children and young people’s services, and on ensuring we are a Great Place to Work. Achieving these priorities will help us meet our ambitious sustainability targets which will see us continue to live within our means and use our resources effectively.
We also saw the continued transformation of our hospital sites. Most importantly, we received the final agreements for the £110 million self-funded rebuild of Tolworth Hospital - a major milestone. In early 2025, we celebrated the groundbreaking of this new hospital, which will provide modern facilities for generations to come. At Springfield University Hospital, our two new hospitals, Trinity and Shaftesbury, are having a positive impact on care and we are seeing reduced patient incidents on wards. The wider development of Springfield Village continues, and we opened the second area of Springfield Park. With the support of our charity, we trained 200 local people in mental health first aid - just one of the many ways we are working beyond our walls and breaking down mental health stigma, to support wellbeing in the community.
We are committed to working in partnership. We were proud to host the inaugural South West London Mental Health Conference, bringing together 100 patients, carers, health professionals and community partners to launch our first South West London Mental Health Strategy, share learning, and build collective momentum for improving mental health care. Its success saw us holding the second conference in May 2025.
We are proud to have such strong foundations on which to build, through continuous improvement, co-production and anti-racism. Together, we remain steadfast in our commitment to Making Life Better Together. We look forward to working with all of you in the year ahead.
Thank you to our patients and their families for trusting us. Thank you to our staff for your hard work, compassion and professionalism. And thank you to our partners and communities for your continued collaboration and support. We have so much to be proud of and so much on which to build.
Ann Beasley, Chair
Vanessa Ford, Chief Executive