Community mental health survey: Find the results for your local trust

We asked over 12,000 people who received NHS community mental health services about their experiences of care.

What we found shows that community mental health care often struggles to meet the needs of everyone currently accessing it. Almost 1 in 3 people reported waiting 3 months or more for an appointment. Half of respondents who contacted crisis services for children and young people said they didn’t get the help they needed.

But we also found that more people said they were treated with care and compassion (67%, up from 65% in 2023 and 2024). More than half of people accessing mental health services for older people (54%) rated their experiences of community mental health care as 9 or 10 out of 10, an improvement on the previous two years.

• Press release: Community mental health care is struggling to meet people’s needs, CQC survey shows
• Find the results for your local trust
• Community mental health survey 2025: National results
• Other NHS patient experience surveys

Join us! Work for CQC

CQC staff have a wide range of skills and work across many disciplines.

Current vacancies include:

• National Professional Advisor – Mental Health
• Pharmacist Specialist
• Financial Accountant
• Specialist Advisor – General Internal Medicine Consultant Doctor
• Data Operations Manager
• Specialist Advisor – Acute Services
• Inspector – Local Authority Assessment Team
• Interim Project Support Officer (Policy) – Human Tissue Authority
• Specialist Advisors – Eating Disorders

Benefits include generous leave entitlement, NHS or Nest pension schemes and a wide range of employee discounts.

Most roles offer flexible locations with the choice to be home-based. See the individual job listings for more information.

• Browse our current vacancies
• Working at CQC

There’s still time to give your feedback on our draft assessment frameworks

Our proposals in our consultation ‘Better regulation, better care’ included moving away from a single assessment framework to separate frameworks that are more specific and relevant to the health and care sectors that we regulate.

We considered the responses and listened to feedback, which showed overwhelming support for this proposal, and have therefore developed an initial 4 draft sector-specific assessment frameworks for:

• adult social care
• mental health care
• primary care and community services
• hospitals, secondary and specialist care

We’d now like to hear your views about the draft frameworks. What we hear from you will be used to further refine each framework ahead of testing this summer.

The period for sharing your feedback will close on 12 June.

• Give your views on draft sector-specific assessment frameworks

Chris Dzikiti to leave CQC

Interim Chief Inspector of Mental Health, Chris Dzikiti will leave CQC at the end of June to take up a new post of Executive Director, Professional Practice at the Nursing and Midwifery Council (NMC).

Chris has been with us since October 2022 when he joined as Director of Mental Health.

During his time with CQC, Chris has held positions of Interim Chief Inspector of Healthcare and Executive Director for Operations.

We will share more on arrangements for covering the Interim Chief Inspector of Mental Health role shortly.

• News: Chris Dzikiti to leave CQC

Our updated approach to assessing local authorities

Following government approval, we have published details of our updated approach for assessing how local authorities are meeting their duties under Part 1 of the Care Act (2014).

Our updated approach is more flexible as we can undertake different types of assessments in different circumstances. This includes comprehensive and focused assessments.

We will also undertake activity using our independent voice to share insights on patterns and themes in people’s experiences, quality issues and good practice in adult social care.

We are introducing regular CQC Local Authority Assurance Meetings to help us to understand the context in which each local authority is discharging its adult social care duties and the impact on the experiences and outcomes for people, including unpaid carers.

• News: Our updated approach to assessing local authorities
• Local authority assessment reports
• Local authority assessment guidance