Annual Members Meeting 2023 | East London NHS Foundation Trust

Nearly 100 members and staff attended our online Annual Members Meeting on 8 February 2024.

Trust Chair Eileen Taylor says “It was heartening to see so many attending this meeting – it shows the interest in our Trust and a desire to help shape our journey towards our population health ambitions and becoming the first ever NHS Marmot Trust.”

Zoom Screenshot

Audit Chair Anit Chandarana and Chief Finance Officer Kevin Curnow took the meeting through our annual accounts for the year ended 31 March 2023. The delay in presenting the accounts to our members was due to us awaiting the outcome of a separate audit of pension liabilities of another organisation for some of our staff who retain a local authority pension scheme, an issue that will continue to impact on timescales going forward. The accounts showed an end-of-year surplus of £1.973m on an income of nearly £640m. In addition, the trust also invested nearly £18m of capital.

Trust governors provided a brief update on their work, impact and strategic focus during the year – due to technical problems only sound was available during the presentation which you can access here:

A presentation on what our population health ambition means in practical terms followed, which highlighted

Healthier Wealthier Newham – a pilot with London Borough of Newham to increase benefit uptake leading to an average increase of family income of more than £4,800
Work on smoking cessation treatment which has seen good results when starting to coproduce the way they work with our service users
Increasing the uptake of crucial cervical cancer screening rates in younger women by working with and through our local community organisations and making access and appointments easier.

These were just three concrete examples of how ELFT aims to make our population health ambition, to improve the quality of life of all we serve, a reality. Our new population health annual report gives more details.

ELFT’s Membership Officer Tina Bixby briefly reported on progress on our membership engagement plan – our population health ambition is unachievable if we cannot communicate with our public telling us what they need. There’s a significant role here for the Trust’s membership function to help facilitate those conversations.

Interim Chief Executive Lorraine Sunduza stressed the complexity of each individual, each family, each community we serve – but also the commitment that whilst being mindful of this complexity we will aim to provide a universally excellent service. We can only do this by collaborating with others: “If you want to go fast, you go alone; if you want to go far, you go together.”

There was a whole host of questions posed in the chat on a variety of themes that are important to our communities: from partnership working with the voluntary sector (and ELFT funding), addressing cost of living issues , waiting times for some services, support for carers and how we use procurement and the Trust’s purchasing power to improve our communities. Not all of these could be addressed in the meeting but responses will be provided outside the meeting.