Lincolnshire Partnership NHS Foundation Trust: Pay & CQC Rating

What LPFT actually runs

Lincolnshire Partnership NHS Foundation Trust (provider code RP7) is a specialist mental health, learning disability and community trust serving Lincolnshire, a large, mostly rural English county. It was formed in June 2002 through a merger of social care and health services previously run by Lincolnshire County Council and Lincolnshire Healthcare NHS Trust, and became a Foundation Trust in October 2007. Precise current staff numbers weren't independently verifiable from public sources at the time of writing — a figure of around 1,886 full-time equivalent staff was reported in 2015, though this is now a dated figure that shouldn't be treated as current. The trust is headquartered at St George's, Long Leys Road, Lincoln.

Its main historic mental health inpatient site is the Peter Hodgkinson Centre in Lincoln. Other named services registered with the CQC include Ash Villa, Havenside Ward, the Manthorpe Centre and Witham Court, alongside a mental health unit on the Lincoln County Hospital site and community learning disability provision including Long Leys Court. LPFT also provides mental health services within HMP Lincoln — a specific and less common combination of prison healthcare and mental health provision for a regional trust of its size.

Mental health nursing progresses through exactly the same Agenda for Change bands as any other field of nursing — our nursing guide covers Band 5 through senior practice and leadership roles across all fields — and allied health professionals working in mental health, forensic and prison healthcare settings are covered in our AHP guide.

CQC rating: Good well-led, and an Outstanding CAMHS service

Under the CQC's current single assessment framework, NHS trusts increasingly receive a specific trust-level well-led rating alongside separate ratings for individual core services, rather than one combined overall word covering everything. LPFT's well-led rating is Good, published 20 August 2026 (CQC provider RP7).

Looking at individually inspected core services, the picture is largely strong: community mental health services for people with a learning disability or autism, community-based mental health services for older people, wards for older people with mental health problems, acute wards for adults of working age and psychiatric intensive care units, forensic inpatient/secure wards, community-based mental health services for adults of working age, and mental health crisis services were all rated Good. Specialist community mental health services for children and young people (CAMHS) were rated Outstanding — a genuinely strong result, and one that's rarer nationally than a Good rating for the same service type. The one service rated Requires Improvement was long stay or rehabilitation mental health wards for working-age adults. Overall, this is a genuinely encouraging, mostly-Good-or-better regulatory picture across a wide range of services, worth reading in full on the CQC's own current provider page for RP7 rather than compressed into a single word.

NHS Staff Survey: mostly above average

In the 2025 NHS Staff Survey, LPFT had 1,782 completed questionnaires at a 59% response rate — well above the 52% median response rate for its 48-organisation benchmark group of Mental Health & Learning Disability and Mental Health, Learning Disability & Community trusts (NHS Staff Surveys Coordination Centre benchmark report, provider RP7). Most measures came out above the benchmark group's average.

The specific numbers: "We are compassionate and inclusive" scored 7.69 (vs 7.61 average), "We are recognised and rewarded" 6.59 (vs 6.37), "We each have a voice that counts" 6.86 (vs 6.89 — marginally below), "We are safe and healthy" 6.43 (vs 6.34), "We are always learning" 5.82 (vs 5.83 — essentially level), "We work flexibly" 7.18 (vs 6.84), "We are a team" 7.28 (vs 7.17), Staff Engagement 6.98 (vs 7.02 — marginally below) and Morale 6.33 (vs 6.12). Taken together with a strong response rate, this is a solidly above-median result overall, with only two measures sitting fractionally below average — small enough to read as broadly in line with the sector rather than a genuine weak spot.

The Peter Hodgkinson Centre and specialist services

Beyond core adult and older adult mental health services, LPFT runs several distinct services worth knowing about:

• Outstanding-rated CAMHS — specialist community mental health services for children and young people, the trust's single strongest externally verified result.
• Forensic inpatient/secure wards — rated Good at the most recent CQC inspection, providing secure mental health care for people involved with, or at risk of involvement with, the criminal justice system.
• Mental health services at HMP Lincoln — a specific, less common combination of prison healthcare and mental health provision for a regional trust of LPFT's size, giving staff exposure to criminal-justice-linked mental health work without needing a separate specialist forensic trust.
• Community learning disability services, including provision at Long Leys Court, rated Good at the most recent CQC inspection of that service type.
• Community-based mental health services for older people and dedicated inpatient wards for older people with mental health problems, both separately rated Good.

Pay, banding and no HCAS

Pay at LPFT runs on the same national Agenda for Change pay bands as any other NHS trust — Band 2 through Band 9, plus medical and dental pay scales for psychiatrists and other doctors. Lincolnshire sits entirely outside every High Cost Area Supplement zone, so no location-based percentage uplift applies to any LPFT role. Use the NHS Pay Calculator with your specific band and pay point selected to see the actual national pay figure that applies here, and the Unsocial Hours Calculator for what a 24/7 inpatient, PICU or forensic secure rota genuinely adds on top of band pay.

LPFT vs East London NHS Foundation Trust

LPFT isn't the only trust on this site with a genuinely strong, mostly-Good-or-better regulatory picture — it's worth comparing it against East London NHS Foundation Trust (ELFT), already covered in depth here, to see how two differently-shaped strong performers compare.

Both trusts show that a strong, largely positive regulatory and staff-experience picture is achievable at very different scales and in very different settings — a large, urban, HCAS-eligible London trust with a decade-long, internationally recognised improvement programme, and a smaller, rural, no-HCAS regional trust with an Outstanding-rated CAMHS service and Good ratings across most of its other core services. Neither is objectively "better"; the NHS Trust Comparison Tool below can help you weigh both, and others, against your own priorities on pay, location and service mix.

Why someone might specifically want to join

Pulling together everything above, a few genuine, verifiable reasons someone might specifically target LPFT over another comparable trust:

• An Outstanding-rated CAMHS service — a genuinely strong, externally verified result for anyone specifically interested in children and young people's mental health work.
• A largely Good-or-better regulatory picture across a wide range of core services — acute, forensic, crisis, older adult and community adult mental health services were all separately rated Good at their most recent inspections.
• Genuinely wide forensic and criminal-justice-linked experience — the trust's secure forensic wards plus its mental health service inside HMP Lincoln give staff exposure to this kind of work without needing a larger, more specialist forensic-only employer.
• An above-median 2025 staff survey response rate and mostly above-average results — a genuinely positive, if modest, staff-experience signal.
• An honest, checkable regulatory position — the trust's one remaining Requires Improvement rating (long-stay/rehabilitation wards) is publicly documented alongside its stronger results elsewhere, giving a genuinely informed picture to weigh before applying to a specific service.

Tools for working out your own numbers

Job title and trust name alone won't tell you what a specific LPFT role is actually worth to you, or how it stacks up against another trust's offer — these three tools do that with your own numbers:

Your employer, not just your role

Lincolnshire Partnership NHS Foundation Trust is your legal employer if you work here, which is what continuous service and any redundancy pay calculation is based on. See our explainer on NHS structure for the broader picture of how trusts, ICBs and NHS England fit together, and how a specialist mental health trust like this one differs from an acute trust operating in the same county.

Related guides

Frequently asked questions