Trust services and ambitions

We are a specialist NHS mental health trust with a focus on training and education as well as providing a full range of mental health services and therapies for children and their families, young people and adults.

We are also a global centre of excellence in clinical practice, training and education, and innovation in the fields of mental health and emotional wellbeing. Our distinctive approach to mental and emotional wellbeing focusses on the importance we attach to developmental, psychological and social experience at all stages of people’s lives across three key areas:

Education: the Trust is a pioneer in mental health, social work and leadership education. We train clinicians, social workers, nurses, teachers and many other professionals. Our clinician-tutor model and multidisciplinary approach ensures our courses are relevant, transformative and empowering.

Clinical services for children and adults: we provide over 30 specialist and community services in Camden, across London and nationally.

Research: our research and innovative approach began just after the First World War following successful recovery of military personnel using the Tavistock model, leading to extensive global trials and proven inquiry for a century. Since our inception, we have built a reputation as a testing ground for fundamental new ideas and practices. For decades our work has helped shape how we see ourselves, as people and as a society. Much thinking that has entered the mainstream emerged from its challenging interdisciplinary research and practice.

Contents

• Our history, facts and figures
• Our new strategy
• Education and training
• Community and integrated services
• Complex mental health services
• Gender services
• Our research
• Our improvement model and financial plans
• Next steps

Our history

We have been at the forefront of exploring mental health and wellbeing since 1920 when we saw our first service user who was a young person. Our history informs our mission and our values – we work to pioneer the development and delivery of effective clinical interventions, and to be a national and international centre of excellence for training and education.

Find out more about our history

Our new strategy

Our new strategy signals our values and sets out a plan to support all of us in coming together to deliver its ambition via a consistent way of working on quality improvement over the next three years. At its core is strengthening our relationship with service users, carers, students, all our partners and each other. This is our plan to ensure services, education, training and research are contemporary and fit for future as we consider merger partners.

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We are an internationally renowned centre of excellence in clinical practice, training and innovation for mental health and wellbeing.

For more than a century we have been at the forefront of services and education, as clinicians, teachers and innovators. Foundational ideas such as infant observation and attachment theory trace their origins back to us, and we continue a culture of innovation today across our work.

Our educators are also our clinicians including world-wide experts, creating a rare clinician-tutor-academic model delivered in a healthcare setting where theory and practice are in constant conversation.

Through our work and current partnerships, we are already one of the biggest providers of mental health education in the world, especially in psychotherapy and social work. However, we are one of the smallest Trusts in the NHS. We are ambitious for the future, and mindful that we must constantly evolve to reflect the changing needs of the people we care for and teach, and the systems in which we work.

Equality, diversity and inclusion

Equality, diversity and inclusion are intrinsic to all areas of course leadership, and professional services at the Tavistock and Portman.

We have a dedicated team whose specific brief is to work with all staff in the Directorate of Education and Training to address issues of equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI) at every level of course design and delivery.

We are also committed to widening participation and enabling access to our many programmes. We want to ensure that students from Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic / Global Majority backgrounds feel welcome and involved when studying with us. This includes being supported to thrive and achieve. We actively monitor our recruiting and awarding gaps to ensure our courses are identifying and addressing areas of concern.

Our courses are part of a long tradition of psychoanalytic, psychological, systemic, forensic, organisational and multi- disciplinary thinking, practice and learning. We are mindful of the complex histories of the traditions we draw on. Our courses commit not only to identifying and addressing discriminatory practice, but also to increasing the representation of staff and students from minority groups including Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic / Global Majority, LGBTQIA+ and disabled students.

We welcome and value students from all social class backgrounds, different cultures, faiths and traditions, and we believe that diverse ways of thinking enrich our teaching and learning.

Education and training offer

Spotlight on: iTHRIVE

The THRIVE Framework for system change is an integrated, person centred, and needs led approach to delivering mental health services for children, young people and their families. It was developed through a collaboration between the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust and the Anna Freud National Centre for Children and Families.

Find out more about THRIVE

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We are proud of the support our dedicated staff offer for children and their families in Camden, across London and nationally. We aim to make our services accessible and easy to understand (for all those involved) and with short waiting times for assessment and treatment.

How do we help?

We work with people that are having a hard time with their mental health. This means that they might be feeling sad or anxious or are not sure why they feel a certain way about something.

Children and their families, or the people that are looking after them, come to us to talk to people who can help them to feel better. They do this by listening carefully to how they are feeling and helping them find different ways that might help them cope and to help them feel better. We will help the patient ask questions when they feel unsure. If they find it hard to talk, they can write or draw pictures to help explain how they feel. We will do our best to make them feel happy and comfortable.

We will meet the patient, and members of their family, and those that care for them and talk about what is going well and what is not going so well and hear what everyone has to say.

Our community and integrated services

Spotlight on: Family drug and alcohol court

• Aims to help parents stabilise/stop using drugs/alcohol and, where possible, keep families together.
• Recent research has found that 52% of the children whose cases go through FDAC are able to remain with their parents, compared with just 12.5% in standard family care proceedings.
• Instead of the usual care proceedings court process, a family chosen for the family drug and alcohol court process goes through a very different process set up to help tackle drug and alcohol problems through the ‘trial for change’.
• Families in proceedings with FDAC will get an allocated judge meaning that the judge will know the family’s case and history inside-out giving consistency to all involved. The parent will also go to court every two weeks to speak directly with their judge – these hearings are called ‘non-lawyer reviews’

Find out more about the family drug and alcohol court

Whilst working within NHS strategic objectives and governance frameworks, we tailor our clinical, consultation, education and research offer to meet the specific, complex needs of service users, service providers and students.

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From the outset, we have sought to prevent the hospitalisation and institutionalisation of individuals who might live useful and productive lives. We treat people across their lifespan and have expanded the understanding of mental health with our developmental approach. This has led to work with an ever-increasing range of professional groups.

We have provided a century of original and innovative thought on human development and how to support those that need help. This is the core driver for our complex services.

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We run and collaborate on applied research projects that take place within and outside of the NHS, with national and international collaborators. Most of our work is focused on children and young people’s mental health and development, although we are interested in mental health and wellbeing across the life-course

Increasingly, our research takes a systematic approach towards the prevention of mental ill-health and looks at ways that we can better tailor or personalise interventions to improve and promote psychological wellbeing. We have a strong inter-disciplinary focus that allows us to integrate insights from a range of perspectives and build on this knowledge to inform innovation in practice.

Our research collaborators

Our research studies

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Our improvement model

Our frontline teams, patients and carers are closest to complex problems and therefore best placed to find solutions. Our quality improvement approach is about giving the people closest to issues affecting care quality the time, permission, skills and resources they need to solve them. It involves a systematic and coordinated approach to solving a problem using specific methods and tools with the aim of bringing about a measurable improvement.

We use A3 problem solving as an approach to reporting issues and presenting ways of addressing them. This way we keep the same story on issues we face and how we are delivering improvement from individual, to team to board level.

Medium term financial plan

1. Assumed starting point is 23/24 plan achievement (£2.5m deficit). M08 assessment is that the year-end plan will be delivered, predicated on the one off GIDS decommissioning costs being funded in total.
2. Initial version of the plan (developed as part of the NCL ICS process) delivers a deficit in 24/25 of c£2.4m. Note this is not a final agreed plan, but a realistic current view of what is achievable in 24/25.
3. The expected deficit in 24/25 is driven in the main by the loss of the overhead contribution from the decommissioned GIDS and NWSDU services, estimated to be c£2.4m.
4. The 24/25 expected deficit assumes a similar level of efficiency to previous years (c.£2.9m in total) and identified additional service and education driven income of c.£1.7m.
5. Efficiency plans (both recurrent and non-recurrent) are currently being developed in the Trust, in line with national annual planning timescales and guidance.
6. Further commercial opportunities, primarily relating to education and consultancy services are also being targeted and developed to contribute to the longer-term financial position of the Trust. These are anticipated to contribute from 25/26 onwards.
7. A balanced plan being delivered in 25/26, supported by the recurrent efficiency program and the further additional income opportunities being targeted.

Service lines and budgets

• Service line 1 – Education and Training: £18,304k
  30.4% of total income
• Service line 2 – Community & Integrated: £15,875k
  26.3% of total income
  • Camden Community Unit – North and South (£4,402k) – 7.3%
  • Camden Community Unit – Other (£4,361k) – 7.2%
  • Integrated Unit – First Step (£885k) – 1.5%
  • Integrated Unit – MOSAIC (£797k) – 1.3%
  • Integrated Unit – PCPCS (£1,246k) – 2.1%
  • Integrated Unit – Surrey Mind Works (£1,299k) – 2.2%
  • Integrated Schools Service – Gloucester House (£1,456k) – 2.4%
  • Integrated Schools Service – North MHST (£714k) – 1.2%
  • Integrated Schools Service – North MHST (£714k) – 1.2%
• Service line 3 – Complex Mental Health: £9,475k
  15.7% of total income
  • Child Complex Service (£3,307k) – 5.5%
  • Social Integration Unit – FDAC (£1,182k) – 2.0%
  • Social Integration Unit – Portman (£1,732k) – 2.9%
  • Social Integration Unit – Returning Families & Key Worker Service (£457k) – 0.8%
  • Social Integration Unit – FCAMHS (£748k) – 1.2%
  • Adult Complex Service (£2,049k) – 3.4%
• Service line 4 – Gender: £16,654k
  27.6% of total income
  • GIC (£7,013k) – 11.6%
  • GIDS (£9,641k) – 16.0% – Decommissioned from 31st March 2024

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