A health boss at an under-fire NHS trust has insisted “positive change” is underway following a string of negative reports about the mental health services it provides.

Zoe Campbell said Tees, Esk and Wear Valleys (TEWV) Foundation Trust was facing many of the same challenges as the wider NHS and that these would take “some time” to change.

TEWV runs Foss Park, a purpose-built 72 bed hospital for people with mental health problems and dementia, opened in April 2020, as well as other mental health services in York.

Two wards in the hospital were inspected at the start of last year as part of wider Care Quality Commission (CQC) review of adult acute wards and psychiatric intensive care units at the trust, with inspectors finding the whole service 'requires improvement'.

Since then, an inspection of trust-wide specialist community mental health services for children and young people, including those provided in York, were rated 'requires improvement' following visits in July of this year.

Further inspections of other TEWV services have resulted in 'requires improvement’ and ‘inadequate’ ratings, though these services are not based within the city of York.

Damning investigation reports into the deaths of three teenage girls in the care of the trust in the north-east were also published last month.

Examining an update report from the trust to a York health scrutiny committee meeting, Cllr Chris Cullwick said the words ‘requires improvement’ and ‘inadequate’ came up “again and again”, while committee chair Cllr Paul Doughty described the Foss Park findings as “disappointing”.

Cllr Cullwick asked Ms Campbell, the trusts’s managing director, when this would change.

She replied: “Even given all of the challenges that we’re facing, we are still seeing positive improvement happening across the board into things starting to get better.

“There’s no point in me sitting here now trying to pretend that we’re going to solve the staffing issues and the rise in acuity and the rising demand readily and easily ourselves, because we’re not going to be able to do that.

“We need to work collectively as whole systems in order to do that, and that’s going to take some time.”

Ms Campbell said the number of issues identified at Foss Park were “very limited” and that points raised by the CQC had been addressed.

Personal safes have been added at Foss Park and soundproofing installed at Orca House in York, with a number of trust-wide improvements also having taken place.

Ms Campbell said that, while staff vacancies and sickness were issues at Foss Park, there was also rising demand and more severe cases.

She said there were “extreme capacity demands” and that the service was sometimes full, but said expanding the number of beds was not the answer.

She added: “We would caution against that and actually look to where we can put more resources into community mental health service and a more preventative approach, rather than build the bed base back up.”