- SERVICE PROVIDER
Bradford District Care NHS Foundation Trust
This is an organisation that runs the health and social care services we inspect
Report from 1 December 2025 assessment
Contents
Ratings - Long stay or rehabilitation mental health wards for working age adults
Our view of the service
Bradford District Care NHS Foundation Trust’s inpatient rehabilitation service is a 12 bedded service. The service, called Step Forward, is a hospital-based rehabilitation service providing specialist mental health treatment and rehabilitation on a single ward. The service provides a recovery-focused treatment programme to enable patients to develop skills in daily living and to manage their mental health conditions. At our last inspection in October 2018, we rated the service overall as requires improvement. It was rated as requires improvement in safe and effective, and as good in caring, responsive and well led domains. We also issued two requirement notices to ensure there were sufficient staff deployed to meet the minimum safe staffing levels, and to ensure care plans were created in collaboration with patients so that they met patients’ assessed needs. Following this inspection we rated the service as good. The service had made improvements and is no longer in breach of regulations. Staff now assessed and mitigated risks effectively. Care plans now guided safe practice including the patient voice. The trust now had enough staff to ensure people’s safety and to meet their identified needs. However, we did find there were vacancies for nurses and some care plans were not as well written as others.
People's experience of this service
During the inspection we spoke to six patients. Overall, patients were very positive about the care they received. They told us that they were confident in the staff team’s ability to keep them safe. They told us they were receiving the care and treatment they needed at the time they needed it, and said the staff were always available to assist them quickly. One patient told us that staff had noticed she was deteriorating but they spent a lot of time with her to support her in creating coping strategies.
However, patients did tell us they thought that staff changed regularly and that they felt the ward was occasionally understaffed.