About MFT > Annual Report
Annual Report
The Mary Frances TrustThe trustees present their report with the financial statements of the company for the year ended 31st March 2004.
Short Report of the Trustees and Financial Summary
For the Year Ended 31st March 2004
A full set of our audited accounts is available on request from the Company Secretary on 01372 375180
GOVERNING DOCUMENT
The Mary Frances Trust is incorporated as a companyny limited by guarantee. The Trust has adopted thehe Charity Commissioners Model Memorandum and Articles of Association for a Charitable Company (GD 1 January 1995) as its governing document.
OBJECTS OF THE CHARITY
The principal object of the charity is to support people with mental health problems, particularly through the use of user led, psycho-social interventions.
TRUSTEES AND ORGANISATION
The trustees during the year under review were:
Mrs S Bond - Chairperson
Mr M Follows - Vice Chairman (Resigned 21/10/2003)
Mrs R Bailey - Trustee
Mr N Birnie Trustee (as of 15/12/2003)
Mrs H Ward - Trustee
Mr P Tiller - Trustee & Treasurer
The trustees are also directors of the charitable company and provide their services free of charge.
The trustees are responsible for running the organisation and in 2003/4 they delegate day-to-day responsibility to Ben Collins, Chief Executive. The operations were carried out by a small staff team working closely with the members who play an essential role in all aspects of operations. Membership of the organisation is open to anyone with a mental health problem, in practice mainly the users of our services. These members elect the Board of Trustees and define the organisation’s short and medium term objectives.
INVESTMENT POWERS
Under the memorandum and articles of association, the trustees have the power to invest funds as they see fit.
REVIEW OF ACTIVITIES
Below we outline our principal activities over the last year. Wherever possible, we have linked each activity to its corresponding funding line in the income and expenditure statements later in this report. As ever, we were fortunate to have continued support from a number of local organisations through a number of donations which contribute to our core costs and are not restricted funds.
Our activities fall into two main areas:
Strategic development
On-going development
We continue to receive support from the Tudor Trust for our strategic development. This has been supplemented with a second generous donation from Cargill, a local business. This year we have undertaken a number of activities to develop the Trust.
The Crisis House
Unfortunately, an opportunity to tender for this service has not come to fruition, partly because of funding, but also because of the slow rearrangement of other services – which means that the service needed in the short term would be markedly different from those in the medium term.
The outcome is that the crisis houses will be run by the local NHS Trust, but managed by a partnership board made up of the Primary Care Trust, the NHS provider trust, and service users supported by the MFT.
This solution, whilst not delivering substantial growth for the MFT, represents an exciting model which we believe may have wider application elsewhere is mental health care – where a true partnership involving service users can actually manage the service on an on-going basis. The Crisis House Board is still in its “forming” stage – agreeing decision making processes, and identifying key initial operational policies. This new “model” is being evaluated from the start through a partnership with Kingston University – a project we hope will develop given sufficient funding.
Work Services
Our Chief Executive has worked closely with senior managers, service users and front line staff within the PCT and the Provider NHS Trust, to develop a three part model for the reconfiguration of work and day services locally. The three parts are user-led day services, social enterprises, and vocational/education connection teams. This project is now approaching implementation stage.
This reconfiguration represents a number of opportunities for us – some challenging to our mission as a charity, some exactly what we are aiming for. The three elements represent what we are already doing, what we could do more of, and what we would like to develop as a new activity. We are in the process of talking to potential partners, and exploring funding options to support our capacity in preparation for a bid once the tender process is announced.
A Partnership Public Service Agreement
Our Chief Executive has also played a lead role in the development of a Partnership Public Service Agreement between the County Council and the Office for the Deputy Prime Minister. The focus of the project has two main strands:
To identify, bring together and coordinate all of the initiatives across the county focusing on disability, diversity and employment, by all of the public authorities, so as to add value and develop a “tool kit” which can then have wider marketability and application.
To help those existing employment and disability providers work on increasing their capacity so that a part of their practice becomes employer facing and enabling mainstream support for disability issues, as well as the more traditional one to one support.
The project – should it achieve its target - would mean a £1.8 million reward for the county – much of which we hope can be re-invested into work services.
Volunteer Project
In partnership with the local Council for Voluntary Service, we are developing a volunteer scheme to better support people with mental health problems to access volunteering. The project has two key strands:
One-to-one support for service users, and help in identifying placements.
Capacity building support to those organisations taking on the volunteer, around disability, mental health and diversity issues.
Direct Payments
Following on from our involvement in a successful countywide pilot to raise the numbers of mental health service users taking up Direct Payments, we have submitted a bid in partnership with the local Independent Living Council to recruit a full time worker and provide training to mentors to further support this process.
On going development
User Involvement
With continued support from EEMS PCT and the County Council, the user involvement project has continued to be enormously successful. In September we were able to recruit a second member to the team, and the project was successful in securing a further year’s funding from statutory sources. The team is involved in a wide range of activities – supporting user involvement in clinical governance, the development of various frontline services, supporting user groups, supporting users through the local service changes, working to improve patent experience within the acute in-patient unit, to name but a few.
Of particular note is our on-going work with the development of the local Early Intervention in Psychosis Team – a project which has now been written up as an example of good practice by the Sainsbury Centre for Mental Health, and the South East Development Centre for Mental Health. In partnership with the University of Surrey, we completed the user led research with service users about their first experiences of psychosis, and supported users to write the operational policy for the service; and as the service goes live, we support users to be involved in the selection, induction and training of the team. Service users remain an integral part of the project steering group.
We are also aiming to take a lead role in the development of user involvement across the county, as mental health services reconfigure yet again into a single county-wide trust.
Education Project
This has developed into a successful and powerful partnership. With the last tranche of money from Surrey Learning and Skills Council and the first tranche from Esmée Fairbairn, this project has enabled 42 service users to access learning this year, 15 of those for the first time. We are the lead in our local Community Learning Partnership on the development of a data base resource linking the range of knowledge and initiatives available to disability and education. Other key partners in this project are the library service and the local FE college.
The Clubhouse
Again, continued support from the County Council and EEMS PCT has meant that our “core” has continued to serve as the hub for many of the activities outlined, in particular, as a first step on the ladder for many members wishing to explore work and education. Aside from those already mentioned, of particular note for our members this year was the on–going commitment to provide support to members in accessing and getting the most from changing mental health and other health services; healthy living initiatives such as nutrition and smoking cessation; opportunities to be integrally involved in the actual running of the organisation such as the accounts, the general administration and the upkeep of our building, including this year the start of a redecoration programme; and an out of hours social programme from meals out, visits up to London, and our first ever social foray abroad, joining the day trippers to Calais.
During this period, the average daily attendance at the Clubhouse was around 22 people, with people attending an average of just under 4 hours on each visit. Over this period, the active membership – i.e. members coming in at least twice a month - was around 60.
The Future
The environment in which we operate continues to be a challenging one as the services around us go through yet more, and quite substantial change. Aligned with this, all our funding sources remain under, in many cases, intense pressure. Our members have reaffirmed our objectives, and the Board and Chief Executive continue to work to deliver a business plan to pursue these. We outline below some of our key activities for the following year.
Young people and mental health
One of the organisational objectives set by our members is to keep people out of the mental health system in the first place. One of the ways in which we plan to do this is through the development of young people’s services – hence our involvement in Early Intervention in Psychosis – and now exploring options around a young person’s Clubhouse.
A County-wide Focus
We are going to spend more time working at a county level for two main reasons:
There is to be a single county wide mental health and learning disabilities trust from the merger of three trusts in April 2005. It will be run by a new Board, which is currently being developed. Within this change, the five PCTs across the county look set to become providers of mental health services as well as commissioners. There will be considerable political, financial and service implications in this. We want to have a county level presence to be able to respond to these changes.
Our objects as a charity state we have a county-wide focus, yet our influence and service reach is still mainly the members who use the Clubhouse. We aim to broaden the membership, representing service users and other stakeholders, and offering support in a wider variety of ways.
Social Enterprises
The sheer amount of time and resources we have had to use to work with the statutory sector on some of the projects outlined above, has
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Copyright Mary Frances Trust 2004