This week is National Work Life Week. At NELFT, we put initiatives in place, to ensure colleagues can balance work and home life. Our flexible working and agile working models enable staff to thrive. Coupled with our excellent training and development opportunities, our colleagues can progress their career, being supported every step of the way in their personal and work lives.

Apprenticeships are available within both clinical and non-clinical areas across NELFT. Some of the job roles we currently run apprenticeships in include Health Support Worker, Nursing Associate, Business Administrator, Assistant Accountant, Data Analyst, Occupational Therapy, Physiotherapist and many more.

At NELFT we also support our current employees with continuing professional development opportunities where they can complete an apprenticeship in a topic that supports their current job role such as Team Leader, Senior Leader and Nursing Top Up.

On Tuesday we held our Trust Board meeting in public and as always, we started with a patient journey. Thank you to Sara Boorman and Dr Annie Cardinal from our Kent and Medway All Age Eating Disorders Service for attending and sharing the story of a 13 year old young person and her family.

This week I have the pleasure of deputising for Jacqui, while she takes some well-deserved leave. I am just back from annual leave myself and it has been lovely to come back to the buzz across the organisation about our CQC rating of Good. I would like to take this chance to thank you all for the work you do each day to support the delivery of the best care by the best people. I am looking forward to working on our improvement areas as we continue our journey towards outstanding.

It’s been great to see our Cavendish Square Group #OpenYourMind campaign go from strength to strength over the last week given it is exam results season and the campaign aims to signpost young people to appropriate mental health support. Thank you to Dr Leon Wehncke, who supports young people in our Brookside unit for supporting the work from a clinical perspective and for acting as a media spokesperson. Was good to hear Leon live on the Vanessa Feltz show on BBC Radio 2 yesterday and fingers crossed there will also be coverage on BBC London TV news this evening.  I am always so proud of the work colleagues do daily across NELFT and it is extra heartening to see us leading the way with work beyond the Trust to make real impacts.