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Colleagues and members joined us face-to-face and online for our Annual Members’ Meeting 2025, to hear about our successes of the past year and our plans for the future.

This year’s meeting was held at Queen Mary’s Hospital in Sidcup where attendees were able to enjoy a tour of some of the services at the site including the Cancer Centre and our children’s services at Acorns.

Chair, Andrew George, opened the meeting and welcomed members, before introducing Chief Executive Officer, Dr Ify Okocha, who spoke about the past year. He said:

The past year has been a challenging one where rising demand and financial pressures have tested our resolve. However, time and again we have risen to the challenges and turned obstacles into opportunities. We will build on this year’s momentum and continue to innovate and adapt and we look forward to implementing changes to ensure we do all we can to improve health and reduce health inequalities in our local communities.

Chief Finance Officer, Azara Mukhtar, gave an overview of the past year’s finances and explained that looking ahead to this financial year, our performance is going to be measured through the NHS Oversight Framework on five pillars. How we perform in staff experience, performance, patient experience, finance and access to services will be measured. She added that, like many organisations across the NHS, we will need to make the most of the money we have available to us and will need to be as efficient as possible and make savings where we can.

Thanks and presentations were made to four governors who are stepping down at the end of their terms of office – Joy Igiebor, Felicia Ajayi, Michael Earnshaw and Lee Hayden.

Lead governor, Tina Strack, gave a round-up of membership news over past year which has included an engagement event with young people, a very popular dementia event and working with the Nepalese community to reduce health inequalities in Greenwich.

Attendees were then invited to vote on a change to our constitution which was passed by a majority vote.

In closing the AMM, Chair Andrew George, said:

It’s been a really positive year for Oxleas. There’s a lot of change going on at pace within the NHS and it gives me confidence as Chair that Oxleas is very clear what its values are and what it wants to achieve.