Nottinghamshire Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust

Ratings - Long stay or rehabilitation mental health wards for working age adults

• Overall

  Requires improvement

• Safe

  Good

• Effective

  Requires improvement

• Caring

  Good

• Responsive

  Good

• Well-led

  Requires improvement

Our view of the service

Date of assessment: 11 and 18 August 2025.

Nottinghamshire Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust’s long stay rehabilitation for adults of a working age in-patient service consists of 36 beds across 2 locations including Thorneywood Mount and Bracken House. During this assessment, we carried out an onsite assessment of both locations.

The service was last rated requires improvement (November 2022). The report was published following CQC’s old inspection approach using key lines of enquiry (KLOEs), prompts and ratings characteristics. This assessment has been completed following the Care Quality Commission (CQC) new approach to assessment; Single Assessment Framework (SAF). We have completed 2 assessments at this location using our new approach and therefore its overall rating is a combination of the new and old methodology. This was an unannounced assessment, which means the provider was not told an assessment was going to be starting beforehand. During this assessment we looked at all quality statements across 2 key question of Effective and Well led and as therefore the rating of these 2 key questions reflects the findings of this assessment. As we only assessed 3 quality statements from the key question Safe and did not assess any quality statements from the key questions; Responsive and Caring, we use the ratings from the previous inspections to rate these key questions. During this assessment we found breaches in regulation under Regulation 9, 17 and Regulation 18. The trust did not have good governance oversight to manage environments, patient outcomes, restrictive interventions or treatment model of the service, staff did not always inform patients of their rights under the mental health act, and staff did not always have access to timely supervision. We asked the trust to produce an action plan in response to these.

People's experience of this service

We spoke with 9 patients, reviewed 12 patient care and treatment records attended 1 ward round meeting and 1 morning huddle meeting.Patients told us staff were kind, friendly and approachable. We saw patients were able to take part in various activities including going to the gym, cooking and walking groups. However, some patients told us they often had to wait for weeks to be supported with certain activities such as cooking.

We found patient treatment plans varied between the 2 locations. At Bracken House patients had long term and short-term goals recorded in their care plans and patients knew about their care plans and told us they were involved in these. However, at Thorneywood Mount patients only had long term goals recorded, and no short-term goals set, and 2 of the 6 patients we spoke with were not aware of their goals or care plans.

We saw numerous restrictions in place around mealtimes at Bracken House, which were displayed as rules in the dining area including “no seconds”, “fruit juice only available at breakfast-one glass only” and “2 fillings only on toasties or paninis”. We raised this with the trust and conducted a revisit to the site, where we found all restrictions around mealtimes had been removed.