Coventry and Warwickshire Partnership NHS Trust

Ratings - Well-led

• Well-led Our assessments of NHS trusts now focus on leadership. We no longer rate trusts overall for their safety, effectiveness and responsiveness or how caring they are. We do still publish those ratings for the services they provide.

  Good

Our view of the service

Coventry and Warwickshire Partnership NHS Trust (CWPT) provides care and treatment for a population of around 1 million people. They employ approximately 4,100 staff who work on 140 different services across 40 sites. Around 5,000 people use the trusts’ services every day, in the community and in 22 wards across 6 hospital sites. The trust provides services across Coventry and Warwickshire, covering the local authorities of Coventry, North Warwickshire, Nuneaton and Bedworth, Rugby, Stratford-on-Avon and Warwick. In the year ending 31 March 2025, the trust had an operating income of £293million.

The trust provides services across three directorates:

• The Mental Health Directorate provides inpatient and community mental health services to adults of working age and older people. Inpatient services are based at the Caludon Centre in Coventry, Manor Hospital in Nuneaton and St Michael’s Hospital in Warwick. Community teams are based across multiple other locations across the area.
• The Learning Disability and Autism Directorate provides inpatient and community services. Inpatient services are provided at Brooklands, a hospital site which contains secure services, specialist assessment and treatment services and an adolescent inpatient service.
• The Children’s Directorate provides mental health and learning disability services to children in Coventry and Warwickshire, and physical health services to children in Coventry.

CWPT is part of the Coventry and Warwickshire and Hereford and Worcestershire Integrated Care Board cluster. CWPT was in Segment 4 of the NHS National Oversight Framework (in which segment 1 indicates high performance and segment 4 indicates low performance) at the time of the assessment.

We had previously inspected CWPT in August to October 2018. At that time, we had rated the trust overall as good and well led as good. At that inspection, we found many areas of good practice, including improved collective leadership and a culture of quality improvement. We also identified some areas for improvement around medicines management, staffing levels and managers’ access to performance information. Since that inspection, there had been considerable changes in the executive and non-executive members of the board.

We undertook a trust level (well-led) assessment, which included an onsite visit on the 28-29 April 2026. During the site visit, we conducted interviews with senior leaders at the trust, including the leadership teams for each directorate. We attended the trust board meeting in March, along with the Finance, Performance and Investment Committee in April 2026 and the Quality Committee in May 2026. We conducted nine focus groups with staff and interviewed six key stakeholders. Prior to the well led review, the CQC had inspected 3 Assessment Service Groups (ASGs). These were community mental health services for adults, mental health crisis and health-based places of safety and mental health wards for older people.

We assessed all 8 of the quality statements in the well-led key question used when assessing an NHS trust using our current framework. At this inspection we rated Coventry and Warwickshire Partnership NHS Trust as good. The rating had stayed the same from the previous inspection.

We identified areas for good practice across the well-led quality statements. These were:

• There was a strong culture of care and compassion towards patients.
• Most staff, leaders and stakeholders spoke positively about the future of the trust.
• Stakeholders spoke positively about the leadership team. Leaders had the experience, capacity, capability and integrity to ensure that the organisational vision could be delivered. Senior staff all had extensive relevant experience. Feedback about the Chief Executive consistently highlighted their energy, visibility and vision.
• Leaders were aware of risks across the organisation and took action to mitigate these.
• Leaders took action to continually review and improve the culture of the organisation in the context of equality, diversity and inclusion. The trust had introduced innovative initiatives to address inequalities.
• The trust had governance, management and accountability arrangements in place. Roles and responsibilities were defined through a scheme of delegation.
• Staff and leaders were pro-active in developing effective, collaborative relationships with external stakeholders and agencies. Stakeholders described the trust’s leadership as positive and constructive.
• Staff and leaders had created well-established systems for reporting, investigating and learning from incidents.
• The Improvement Team had trained over 1000 staff in quality improvement methodology and built capacity in the trust for improvements to be implemented.
• Leaders were aware of the trust’s impact on environmental sustainability. They were able to provide examples of where the trust had made changes to reduce the trust’s carbon footprint.

We identified areas for improvement across the well-led quality statements. These were:

• Some proposals for significant organisational developments lacked detail and did not include the views of staff or patients.
• Managers did not always have access to good quality data. This made it difficult for the trust to accurately monitor performance in some areas of service delivery
• In some instances, staff and leaders had different perspectives on clinical risk.
• Many staff had negative experiences of organisational restructuring. This continued to have an impact on staff morale and engagement. For some staff, constant change was leading to staff burnout and declining morale.
• The trust had struggled to maintain a consistent Freedom To Speak Up officer. This meant that the amount of contact with the Freedom To Speak Up office was low.
• Staff from minority ethnic groups reported more adverse experiences at work such as harassment and discrimination. Whilst the trust had introduced initiatives to reduce violence and aggression, staff from minority ethnic groups, especially African staff, were more likely to be the victims of these incidents.

People's experience of this service

During our assessments of community mental health services for adults, mental health crisis and health-based places of safety and mental health wards for older people, we spoke with 42 people using the services, their relatives or carers. Most people gave positive feedback. Staff were consistently described as kind, compassionate, helpful, friendly, and motivating. Patients felt listened to and supported in a safe and calm environment. Several patients praised their key workers for being understanding and creating a space where they felt comfortable. Most patients reported understanding their medication, including its purpose and potential side effects, with explanations provided by doctors. Overall, patients valued the person-centred approach, flexibility, and continuity of care offered by the service. However, within community mental health services, some patients said they had experienced long waits for certain treatments, such as psychology input or specific types of therapy.

The 2025 NHS Community Mental Health Survey was completed by 209 patients. The results showed the trust scored about the same as other trusts in most categories. However, the scores were worse than expected for ‘Mental Health Team’. This related to patients feeling they weren’t given enough time to discuss their needs and treatment.

Feedback from the local Healthwatch was mixed. Healthwatch highlighted that feedback about mental health services was consistently more negative than other services. They said they received concerns about poor communication, poor engagement and insufficient engagement. There were also specific concerns raised about waiting times for child and adolescent mental health services. They said that some people had told them about difficulties accessing mental health support, particularly if their mental illness was accompanied by neurodevelopmental disorders or substance misuse.

The trust sought feedback from patients using the ‘I Want Great Care’ app. In March 2026, the trust received 538 responses. Ninety-three percent of respondents reported a positive experience. Patients suggested improvements to the services through this feedback. The most frequently mentioned areas for improvement were in food for inpatient services, communication, children’s waiting areas, waiting times and tailoring treatment to meet patients’ needs.