- SERVICE PROVIDER
Coventry and Warwickshire Partnership NHS Trust
This is an organisation that runs the health and social care services we inspect
Assessment report published 20 July 2026
Contents
Ratings - Mental health crisis services and health-based places of safety
Our view of the service
We carried out an assessment of Coventry and Warwickshire Partnership NHS trust urgent care service between 17 March and 01 May 2026. The trust was inspected as part of CQC’s Adult Community Mental Health Programme.The trust provides urgent care and treatment to adults in Coventry and Warwickshire who are experiencing a mental health crisis. Support is available 24 hours a day.
People who enter the service are generally seen at home, with the aim to prevent hospital admission where possible. The teams work with inpatient wards and accept referrals for people being discharged from hospital, to enable continued support at home. The health-based place of safety provides services for people who require assessment under Section 136 or 135 of the Mental Health Act 1983. There is an adjoining psychiatric clinical decisions unit, which offers people in crisis a short-term space to stay, for extended assessment, or if awaiting an inpatient bed.
We inspected the crisis and home treatment teams based in Coventry, North Warwickshire and South Warwickshire. We also inspected the health-based place of safety and visited the psychiatric clinical decisions unit, based at the Caludon hospital site in Coventry.
We last inspected the mental health crisis service in 2018. It was rated good overall. Since the last inspection, the service had made some improvements around medicines management.
This inspection was announced one working day prior to our visits to ensure people we needed to speak with were available. Our rating of this service went down. We rated it as requires improvement. We found breaches under the Health and Social Care Act under Regulation 12: Safe care and treatment; Regulation 17 Good governance and Regulation 18: Staffing. We have asked the trust for an action plan in response to the breaches of regulations found during this assessment.
Mental Health Act and Mental Capacity Act Compliance Summary
Training on the Mental Health Act was not mandatory for staff across the service, but was role dependent. Staff we spoke with across the teams, including staff at the health-based place of safety were able to describe the Code of Practice guiding principles. Training compliance in the Mental Health Act was over 75%.
The service had the relevant policies and procedures that reflected all relevant legislation and the Mental Health Act Code of Practice. In the health-based place of safety, staff explained to each patient their rights during detention. Rights were repeated to patients as needed. Staff recorded this in the patients’ records.
Individuals’ capacity to make decisions was monitored and recorded by staff during multidisciplinary team meetings. We found that capacity and consent was initially considered and explored when people entered the crisis service. Staff training compliance with training was over 75%. Staff we spoke with were aware that consent needed to be obtained from all people entering the service.
People's experience of this service
We spoke with 10 people who had used the service across all three crisis / home treatment teams. Most people told us that staff had been supportive, kind and respectful. Some patients said that staff were ‘fabulous’, ‘brilliant’ and ‘wonderful’. One person told us they had a negative experience with the crisis team in Coventry.
All people we spoke with knew how to contact the services for urgent care. They said they found this straightforward. Everyone told us staff had contacted them when they said they would or had visited them in a timely way.
Many people told us how staff had sign posted them to relevant services and resources to help them manage their symptoms. One person told us they had received a joint visit between the crisis team and the community mental health team, which they thought was helpful. One person explained they were on the waiting list for the community mental health team and could use the 111-telephone service if they needed immediate support.