CNWL has published the Quality Account for 2025-26, which can be downloaded by clicking here.

Our Quality Account is our annual report on the quality of care we provide and the improvements we are making for patients, carers and communities. We regularly review how we're doing by listening to feedback from patients, carers and partners, alongside looking at inspection results, audits, staff training, quality improvement work and external accreditations.

These measures show that we have continued to maintain a strong focus on quality throughout the year. One of our biggest achievements is that, for the third year in a row, no mental health patients needed to be admitted outside their local area, helping people stay closer to their families, communities and the teams supporting their care.

In the opening statement, Claire Murdoch, Chief Executive, said:

“I would like to thank all our staff for their professionalism, compassion and dedication in delivering high-quality care for the diverse communities we serve, and I am extremely grateful for the contributions of our Experts by Experience – service users and carers”.

This year we strengthened the role of people with lived experience through our new Involvement Strategy, which sets out our commitment to co-production and ensuring service users and carers help shape services, staff training and recruitment. We also fully implemented the Patient Safety Incident Response Framework (PSIRF), supporting a more compassionate approach to learning from incidents and improving care.

More than 900 staff took part in Safety Conversation Week, sharing over 150 projects that are making care safer and improving patient experience. This work received national recognition, with two teams named regional champions at the NHS Excellence Awards.

We also launched Achieving Clinical Excellence (ACE), our ward-based improvement programme that brings together standards, data and feedback from patients, carers and staff to help teams understand what good care looks like and drive continuous improvement.

The Trust also achieved Triangle of Care accreditation, recognising its strong commitment to involving and supporting carers and families. The accreditation acknowledges the continued efforts of staff, service users and carers to work together in partnership to improve care and services.

While our overall Care Quality Commission (CQC) safety rating remains Requires Improvement, we remain committed to learning from incidents and delivering sustained improvements across all services. A revised Safety Strategy was launched in March 2026 to support this work.

Progress on quality priorities

Between 2023 and 2026, we focused on three key priorities:

• Reducing pressure ulcers (bed sores) by improving prevention, identifying people at risk earlier, strengthening staff training and learning from incidents. 
• Reducing restrictive practices by using less restrictive ways of keeping people safe. CNWL now performs below the national average and is among the best-performing trusts in London for acute wards and psychiatric intensive care units (PICU).
• Measuring the difference our services make by focusing more on outcomes for patients. This means looking at how people's health, wellbeing and quality of life improve as a result of the care they receive, and using that information to improve services.

Looking ahead

Our next phase will focus on strengthening the systems that support high-quality care across the Trust. This includes expanding Achieving Clinical Excellence (ACE) and embedding a new Quality Management System (QMS), which will bring together improvement, assurance, patient feedback and learning into a single approach.