A mental health trust boss returned to provide a comprehensive strategy on how the service would improve after criticism at a previous committee hearing.

Dr Adrian Richardson was called back to the health and adult social care (HASC) overview and scrutiny committee after being previously told to regularly attend until the service’s performance improved.

Dr Richardson, director of partnerships and transformation for KMPT, was joined by Sheila Stenson, chief finance and resources officer and deputy chief executive, to outline the ways the service aims to improve problem areas identified at the HASC meeting in August.

Issues mentioned in a previous report included waiting times, staff retention, worker dissatisfaction and people being asked to travel far for appointments.

Dr Richardson said the strategy covers 2023 to 2026, but for 2023 the focus is on five themes: ensuring patients are seen in a timely manner and are given support to leave hospital; effectively diagnosing dementia patients and providing adequate on-going care; transforming community mental health care; reducing violence and racism; and recruitment and retention of staff.

Councillors asked about employee turnover, the measurability of success, and the closure of Medway’s Ruby Ward, an acute mental health ward for older people, which is being replaced with a new facility in Maidstone.

Dr Richardson said the turnover rate of staff was 18%, the same as cited at the previous HASC meeting, but said there were early indications this would come down as there was growing engagement with the strategy.

He said: “18% puts KMPT, nationally, middle of the road in terms of turnover. It’s still higher than we would like and we want to make sure we gain high-quality staff and retain them for as long as possible.

“We have actually seen a reduction in the last three months, we are hopeful that will continue. We have found staff have really wanted to engage with the strategy and gain an understanding of how they are individually contributing to that.”

Cllr David Brake (Con) also asked specifically about the turnover in higher levels of KMPT after restructuring was announced earlier this year and asked how long the new senior staff had been involved with KMPT.

This was in relation to the retirement of the current KMPT chief executive Helen Greatorex at the end of the month. She will be replaced by the Ms Stenson.

She said: “I’ve been with KMPT six years next month, so I’m probably one of our longest serving executives. We have got a stability in our executive team, I know KMPT very well so there is stability at that level.”

Cllr Esther Cook asked about how certain targets would be evaluated in relation to reduction of instances of racism and feelings of self-harm.

She said: “It’s quite hard for us to look at the whole strategy and see the finer details of where are we now? Where are we going to be and how quickly? And is that an ambitious enough target?”

Dr Richardson said there were benchmarks for the years the strategy is in place to demonstrate whether KMPT is succeeding in their ambitions.

He said: “We’re not going to have a linear trajectory, as you’re not going to be able to do that when you’re trying to drive improvement. It’s much more, normally, a logarithmic level of improvement.

“You’ll see a very small turning of the dial for the first few months and then it will start ramping up as we learn from that and we ramp up all that learning into something bigger.”

Ms Stenson added: “We spent a lot of time looking at data and some data we’re still trying to gather to get a really clear baseline.

“We’ve been ambitious and said we would love to get to 85% bed occupancy. We know that’s not going to happen by year one so it’s going to happen by year three.

“That’s us looking and thinking here’s where we are now, about 96%, in some cases 98%, bed occupancy, and how do we realistically get to 85%.”

Cllr David Wildey (Con) asked about Ruby Ward, an acute mental health ward for older people, at Medway Maritime Hospital which is being wound down to be replaced with a new Ruby Ward in Maidstone.

He asked if the facility was still being removed from the Towns even though there was a need for hospital beds across Kent.

Dr Richardson said the plan would continue as the ward in Medway was not capable of providing adequate care.

He said: “While we have some beds that are currently being used, they are below what we want to provide our patients.

“There are multifactorial reasons for bed shortages. On Monday we had 50 of our 150-bed stock occupied with patients that were clinically ready for discharge.”

Cllr Wildey also asked the committee to acknowledge the work of Helen Greatorex ahead of her retirement and said the service had significantly improved since she started, but there was still work to be done.