Brighton and Hove’s mental health chief to step down

The woman in charge of the mental health trust serving Brighton and Hove has announced that she plans to step down next summer.

Lisa Rodrigues, 58, the chief executive of Sussex Partnership NHS Foundation Trust, announced her decision to the trust board’s annual general meeting yesterday (Wednesday 25 September).

She has run the trust since it was formed in April 2006 when it brought together the mental health, learning disability and substance misuse services provided by three separate trusts.

They were South Downs Health NHS Trust, West Sussex Health and Social Care NHS Trust and East Sussex County Healthcare NHS Trust.

Ms Rodrigues ran the East Sussex trust from December 2001 until the merger and has since become one of the longest-serving chief executives in the NHS.

Sussex Partnership runs community mental health services in Brighton and Hove. It also runs the Brighton and Hove Eating Disorder Service as well as Mill View Hospital in Hangleton.

Lisa Rodrigues

Ms Rodrigues was made a CBE in the Queen’s Birthday Honours List in June last year for services to the NHS.

She began her career as a nurse and health visitor and trained at the Great Ormond Street Charles West School of Nursing in London.

Her first NHS job was as a nursing assistant at the former Forest Hospital for people with learning disabilities in Horsham in 1973.

She said yesterday: “This has been the best job I have ever had. That is because of the wonderful people who I have had the honour to work with and serve.

“I have given Sussex Partnership 11 months’ notice in order to enable a full and open recruitment process for the new chief executive.”

The trade magazine HSJ (Health Service Journal) reported her as saying: “Leaving well is a very important part of being a chief executive but isn’t always achieved.

“Being at Sussex Partnership has been an amazing job and I want my board to have plenty of time to look for my successor and find someone wonderful who is different from me and full of new ideas.”

One of the biggest challenges facing mental health services, she said in HSJ, was the disparity between acute hospitals and the mental health sector.

The magazine quoted her as saying: “Commissioners are still operating totally separate budgets when we need to really be commissioning these services all as one.”

She was reported to have said that commissioners repeatedly made “unequal” savings demands on mental health providers compared with those in acute sector.

She added: “Commissioners are stuck between a rock and a hard place and they have to make savings.

“But because mental health has delivered in the past they come back to ask for more.

“There is still a lot of stigma around using mental health services and around providing those services as well.”

John Bacon

Sussex Partnership chairman John Bacon paid tribute to Ms Rodrigues. He said: “I was of course very reluctant to accept Lisa’s decision.

“She has been a tremendously successful chief executive of Sussex Partnership and its predecessors for 12 years.

“She led our merger process and then took the new trust into foundation and teaching trust status.

“Over this period our reputation has grown on a national level as we have developed into a leading teaching and research-based provider of mental health, learning disability, substance misuse and prison healthcare services.

“There will be opportunities for me to pay tribute to Lisa’s achievements over the next year but I wanted to say straight away that she will be a great loss to Sussex Partnership and to me as chair.

“At the same time I fully understand and support her desire to retire and seek new challenges.

“I will begin the process of appointing Lisa’s successor shortly.

“A national advertisement will appear in the new year and the intention is that the new chief executive will be in place by the time Lisa leaves us in the summer of 2014.

“Given the strong reputation Sussex Partnership now enjoys I have every confidence that we will attract a high-quality field.

“Lisa, myself and the executive team aim to make the transition as smooth as possible

“In the meantime we have an ambitious agenda that we will continue to take forward at full speed.

“We have launched our new strategy, Making Breakthroughs, which will put us in excellent shape to develop and cope with the difficult financial agenda faced by the NHS over the next few years.

“Lisa will be leading this work with all her usual drive, enthusiasm and passion for continuously improving care for our patients.”

She said that she did not know what she would do next after she steps down.