Manchester Mental Health and Social Care Trust

Tracy Ellery has worked in NHS Finance in the North West for more than 25 years and has experience in Mental Health, Learning Disabilities, Community Primary Care and Acute as well as the NHS Executive.
She has also served as Interim Chief Executive at the Trust.

As Director of Nursing and Therapies, Adrian Childs is driving the quality agenda for service users and carers, effectively ensuring their voices are heard, and appropriate action taken, throughout the Trust.

And having worked as a nurse he has a heartfelt understanding of the issues faced by Trust staff.

He joined the Trust's Executive Team in April 2009 having spent much of his NHS career in mental health, beginning his professional career as a support worker for older people. He moved to become an acute nurse working in surgery, intensive treatment/therapy unit and in a high dependency renal unit. He returned to mental health services and worked as a specialist nurse focusing on quality - a continuing priority today. He has also worked at Director level as well as having a role in a Strategic Health Authority - bringing a great understanding of what those organisations need to his role.

His other area of interest is leadership - identifying it in others and then encouraging and driving them to lead. He led the national programme for mental health nurse leadership and is proud that the majority of participants on that programme have moved onto other posts including director-level appointments around the country.
Throughout his career he has focused on listening to the service users and carers at the receiving end.
"Throughout all the different grades and roles I've had, I've always gone back to service users and carers to ground me and make me look at things from a different way and so I don't automatically come from an organisation's perspective," he says.

To unwind, Adrian enjoys spending time in the countryside and on the beach, walking with his dogs and he enjoys listening to music - especially opera, Mahler and jazz - as well as making it. When time permits, he plays the piano accordion, an instrument he was trained in classically.

Stuart Hatton joined the Trust in April 2009 from his role as Director of Service Delivery at Bradford District Care Trust.

He has extensive experience in the health sector, beginning his professional career in the early 1980s. He has worked on strategy and held Chief Executive level posts for 4 years before moving to healthcare management consultancy.

Whilst in Bradford he led services through three simultaneous major strategic reviews and developed care group based care strategies for Older People's Mental Health Services, Adult Mental Health, Substance Misuse and Forensic Services, whilst supporting the development of business units in preparation for Foundation Trust status.

He designed and developed the Care Group structure for the Trust and led on developing the service based changes to deliver the Trust's service development plans. In his time with the Trust he has strived to encourage innovative and best practice application and the inclusion of users and carers in service planning and redesign.

Away from work Stuart is a keen rugby union fan, particularly of England (although he lives in Wales) and spends as much time as possible with his two Bichon Frise dogs, children and grandchildren.

Dr Sean Lennon has been a consultant old age psychiatrist in South Manchester for 23 years and served as Divisional Director for Mental Health at South Manchester University Hospital Trust before the formation of Manchester Mental Health and Social Care Trust.

He has held the positions of Clinical Director and Associate Medical Director at the Trust and is a regional representative for the Royal College of Psychiatrists Faculty of Old Age Psychiatry. He is also the Deputy Chairman of Age Concern Manchester.

Before coming to the Trust John was the Chief Officer of Manchester Community Health (MCH), the provider arm of NHS Manchester.

He fulfilled this role from the inception of MCH in October 2006 to the dispersal of its services among Manchester Trusts at the end of March 2011.

Prior to becoming Chief Officer of MCH John was the Director responsible for community and primary care services at North Manchester Primary Care Trust, a role he took up in 2003.

He has also held a senior management role at Salford Royal Hospitals Trust, where he had responsibility for clinical support services and critical care, after being seconded to Ashworth Hospital on Merseyside for almost a year as the Director of Care Services.

Prior to this John spent a number of years at Stockport Healthcare Trust, including four and a half as Business Manager of Psychiatry, and also served as Assistant Chief Executive.

He began his career in the NHS as a diagnostic radiographer, working in clinical, tutoring and management positions in the field for more than 12 years.

John is married with three grown up children and spends as much time as possible trying to improve his golf. He is also interested in travel, literature and cinema.

A shared vision and teamwork is crucial in delivering the desired outcomes, stresses Jessica. Apart from a year out travelling and a couple of stints working at various international sporting events, Jessica has spent her entire professional career in the NHS, working mainly in London Hospital Trusts, including her first Board position as a Project Director at West London Mental Health Trust, before she moved to Manchester.

And working with others is vital. "I am proud of every successful team I have worked with over my career in the NHS," she says. "Nothing is ever delivered successfully by an individual - teamwork is essential and I am most proud of consistently being able to deliver safe and improved patient services or leading great teams who have the same drive and enthusiasm to achieve this."

Jessica joined the Trust in April 2008 to spearhead the drive to become a Foundation Trust. The role involves Jessica working within the Executive Team to set the direction of the project, take responsibility for its progress and then accountability for the end result. She admits: "Being a Project Director tends to involve significant public relations and communications, ability to get things done with enthusiasm and efficiency but above all, general bossiness!"

Her current role involves extensive communication with people from a range of organisations and sectors across Manchester. "The main reason I love my job is due to the interesting, varied and good people that I have the opportunity to meet. Service users and carers have been particularly vital in my current role and I know I have learnt a huge amount from them which hopefully I can use to shape services and our organisation in the future," she says.

Away from the office, Jessica puts family life and friends top of her list to keep her mentally well: "Laughing with friends, enjoying life with my kids, planning the family's next travel adventure, reading as part of a Book Club and running (slowly), horse riding and playing tennis (badly)." Never forgetting that she is a Londoner first and a huge sports fan second, Jessica is also looking forward to the Olympics and hoping to be selected as a volunteer for the Games. Jessica plans on taking up the Trust's flexibility in allowing staff to buy an additional two weeks annual leave in 2012!