Trust Annual Members' Meeting is 'best one yet'

The Trust's Annual Members Meeting (AMM) on Wednesday 11 September 2019 was a huge success, with feedback that it had been the best one staged by the Trust.

The AMM kicked off with a market place event, in which Trust teams displayed their achievements from the last year and their visions for the year ahead.  

Our Trust governors, who had a key role in arranging the AMM, had a stall (pictured), promoting the role of the governor within the Trust and undertook a membership survey on the day – with baskets of fruit being awarded to lucky members for sharing their feedback.  

The meeting opened with a focus on the Trust’s inclusion work over the 2018/19 year and progress that has already been made during 2019/20. Colleagues from our staff networks, Bal Singh, Sharon Rumin, Carol Fordham, Emma Frudd and Leanne Walker (pictured), shared their highlights and achievements from the year and spoke about their priorities.

Trust Chief Executive Ifti Majid took members through his reflections of 2018/2019 year, highlighting the Trust’s key achievements and steps to embed the Team Derbyshire Healthcare Promise. Ifti also shared the Trust’s plans for the future and provided an update on its strategic direction of travel, as outlined in the new Trust Strategy, the plan on a page and clinical ambition documents.

Carolyn Green, Director of Patient Experience, shared progress on the Trust’s quality priorities over 2018/19 and Claire Wright, Deputy Chief Executive and Director of Finance, provided a financial update. The Trust’s Annual Report and Accounts for 2018/19 (which also includes the Quality Report) is available on this website.  

Emotional subjects in writing contest

The meeting also saw the announcement of the winners of the writing competition on the theme of ‘Looking back/looking forwards’. A total of 56 people shared their writing, which often covered very personal and emotional subjects. There were four categories: service user poetry, service user prose, staff, Trust members and volunteers, and overall winner.  The eight finalists were invited to attend the AMM and the entries were published in a booklet.  

Our guest judge for the competition, award winning author and formed Trust colleague Joanna Cannon wrote the following message about the entries for the competition:

“Having left school at 15, qualified as a doctor in my thirties, and written two Sunday Times bestsellers, I can still honestly say that judging this competition is one of the hardest things I've ever had to do.

“Anyone who has the courage to write their thoughts onto paper deserves acknowledgement and recognition, because it truly is an act of bravery, and so it was desperately hard to pick out a shortlist from the wonderful, moving, funny and often deeply sad entries.”

The overall winner was Jill Wilkes with her piece titled: ‘Memories; shards of a broken mirror’. The judges’ comments were: “This is beautifully written. The combination of the imagery and words is incredible. The emotion felt within this piece of writing really made the poem stand out”.