Updated 27 March 2026
Bradford Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust is responsible for providing hospital services for the people of Bradford and communities across Yorkshire. They serve a core population of around 500,000 people and provide specialist services for some 1.1 million.
The trust employs more than 6,500 staff who work over several sites, including Bradford Royal Infirmary, which provides the majority of inpatient services, and St Luke’s Hospital, which predominantly provides outpatient and rehabilitation services. The trust also manages local community hospitals at Eccles Hill, Westwood Park, Westbourne Green, and Shipley.
We undertook a trust-level assessment (well-led review) of the trust which included an on-site visit on 4 to 6 November 2025. We undertook further visits to observe the trust’s board and committee meetings on 25 September 2025. We also asked the trust’s partners for feedback and held stakeholder interviews.
We assessed all 8 of the quality statements in the well-led key question used when assessing an NHS trust in the Single Assessment Framework. The trust level-assessment followed several assessments of the trust’s assessment service groups (frontline services) in September and October 2025. We undertook these assessments to ensure we had a thorough understanding of the full range of services provided by the trust ahead of our trust-level assessment.
As well as the trust-level assessment, we assessed the following service groups:
- Community health services for adults
- Outpatient services for adults
- Maternity services
- Urgent and emergency care
Our assessments identified concerns in urgent and emergency care. We raised our concerns with the trust who took immediate action to address the issues. We undertook a further visit to services as part of our on-site trust-level assessment activity in November 2025 to check that the trust had made improvements. We found that the trust had addressed the areas of concern we had previously identified.
We undertook these assessments to ensure we had a thorough understanding of the full range of services provided by the trust ahead of our well-led review.
We assessed quality statements within key questions. Each quality statement assessed is awarded a score. Details on how we score can be found on our website: https://www.cqc.org.uk/about-us/how-we-do-our-job/ratings
You can find further information about we carried out our assessments at: https://www.cqc.org.uk/about-us/how-we-do-our-job/what-we-do-inspection
Overall, the trust was rated as good for the well led key question. At our last inspection, we rated the trust as requires improvement.
We found areas for improvement within four of the eight quality statements and positive findings within four of the eight quality statements. The trust were sighted on most of the areas of improvement and had plans in place to address them. We identified areas which did not breach regulation but were areas for improvement including shared direction and culture, capable compassionate and inclusive leaders, freedom to speak up and workforce, diversity and inclusion.
The assessment team included a CQC deputy director, operations managers, inspectors, an executive reviewer and specialist professional advisors with experience of working in the assessment service groups we assessed, or with experience as senior leaders in the NHS.