Tees, Esk and Wear Valleys NHS Foundation Trust: Pay & CQC Rating

What the trust actually runs today

Tees, Esk and Wear Valleys NHS Foundation Trust is the mental health and learning disability NHS provider for a very large area of North East England and North Yorkshire — County Durham and Darlington, Teesside, North Yorkshire, York and Selby — serving a population of around 2 million people across more than 200 sites and community bases, making it one of the geographically largest mental health foundation trusts in England. Reported figures put its workforce at around 7,500 staff. Services span adult mental health, older adults' mental health, learning disability provision, forensic services, and eating disorder treatment.

Mental health nursing here runs through exactly the same Agenda for Change bands as any other field — see our nursing guide for how progression works from Band 5 through senior practice and leadership roles — and allied health professionals and psychologists working across the trust's community and forensic services are covered in our AHP guide.

Roseberry Park, Lanchester Road and the trust's hospital sites

The trust's main hospital sites include Roseberry Park Hospital in Middlesbrough, Lanchester Road Hospital in Durham, West Park Hospital in Darlington, Auckland Park Hospital in Bishop Auckland, and Cross Lane Hospital in Scarborough, alongside the Catterick Integrated Care Centre and a wide network of further community sites. Given the trust's very large geographic footprint, a role advertised with TEWV could be based anywhere from Durham in the north of its catchment to Scarborough on the North Yorkshire coast — always check the specific site named on a job advert rather than assuming a central location.

What makes this trust distinctive

Beyond general adult and older adult mental health provision, the trust runs dedicated forensic mental health services and eating disorder treatment services across its catchment, and its sheer geographic scale — covering both post-industrial Teesside conurbations and much more rural North Yorkshire in a single trust — gives staff exposure to a genuinely wide range of community settings and population needs within one employer.

West Lane Hospital and the 2025 statutory public inquiry

This is a serious and current part of the trust's history that we think anyone researching it as an employer should know about, reported here factually. Between June 2019 and February 2020, three teenagers — Christie Harnett (17), Nadia Sharif (17) and Emily Moore (18) — died while inpatients under the trust's care. Christie Harnett and Nadia Sharif died at West Lane Hospital in Middlesbrough; Emily Moore died at Lanchester Road Hospital in Durham, having been moved there roughly eleven days before her death. West Lane Hospital was closed by the CQC in August 2019, and independent reviews subsequently found what has been described as "multifaceted and systemic" failings at the site.

In December 2025, the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care announced a statutory public inquiry under the Inquiries Act 2005 into patient deaths at the trust, following more than a decade of campaigning by more than 40 affected families. The inquiry is set to examine patient deaths by suicide at the trust over roughly the past ten years, not only the three cases above. This is a genuinely significant, current development — a statutory inquiry carries legal powers to compel evidence and witnesses, and represents a formal government response to sustained concerns raised over many years.

CQC rating: Requires Improvement, with a recent partial recovery

The trust's overall Care Quality Commission rating is currently Requires Improvement, per the CQC's own published position for the trust (provider code RX3). This is the trust's genuine, current headline rating, and we're reporting it as such rather than an older or more favourable historic figure.

It isn't an entirely static or uniformly negative picture, though. A focused CQC inspection of the trust's mental health crisis services and health-based places of safety, reported in 2024, re-rated that specific service Good — a genuine, specific improvement. At the same inspection, however, CQC inspectors still found breaches of regulation relating to staffing levels, an insufficient number of appropriately trained staff, and some ineffective systems and processes at that service. That combination — a service moving from a weaker rating to Good while regulatory breaches are still being identified — is worth understanding in full rather than reducing to a single word. As with any inspection-based rating, treat both the overall Requires Improvement position and the improved crisis-service rating as snapshots that can change at future inspections, and check the CQC's own provider page for RX3 for the current position on the specific service or ward you're considering.

NHS Staff Survey: what we could and couldn't verify

We could not independently verify a specific, current official NHS Staff Survey headline result for this trust — such as a "would recommend as a place to work" percentage — from public sources at the time of writing. Older NHS Staff Survey figures and separate third-party employee review sites both exist for this trust, but neither is an adequate substitute for a current NHS Staff Surveys Coordination Centre benchmark result.

Pay, banding and why there's no HCAS

Pay at this trust runs on the same national Agenda for Change pay bands as any other NHS trust — Band 2 through Band 9, plus medical and dental scales for psychiatrists. High Cost Area Supplement applies only to London and a defined set of Fringe districts just outside it; no part of County Durham, Darlington, Teesside, North Yorkshire, York or Selby falls within any HCAS zone. So pay here is the standard national rate for your band and point, with no location weighting applied, wherever in the trust's very large catchment your specific post is based. Use the NHS Pay Calculator to see the exact national rate for your band.

Unsocial hours and rota-driven roles

Acute wards, crisis and home treatment teams, and inpatient sites including Roseberry Park and Lanchester Road run continuously, so night, weekend and bank holiday shifts are a routine part of many clinical roles here. The Unsocial Hours Calculator shows what a genuine rota pattern adds on top of band pay, worth checking alongside the staffing-level concerns raised in CQC findings above before accepting an inpatient role here specifically.

This trust vs North East London NHS Foundation Trust

North East London NHS Foundation Trust (NELFT) is a genuinely useful, honest comparison here — both trusts have had serious, publicly documented CQC concerns in their recent history, but they currently sit at different points in that trajectory, which is worth being direct about rather than glossing over.

NELFT's trajectory — a documented Requires Improvement finding followed by a genuine, verified recovery to Good — is a useful reference point for what improvement from a difficult starting position can look like in practice, without suggesting the two trusts' specific histories are equivalent in severity. Use the NHS Trust Comparison Tool to compare either trust against a specific role you're considering.

Weighing this trust honestly

We'd rather set out the genuine trade-offs plainly than write around them:

• A statutory public inquiry is a serious, current fact about this trust's history, and it's actively examining patient deaths over roughly the past decade — not a closed or purely historic matter.
• The trust's overall CQC rating is currently Requires Improvement, though specific services (crisis care) have shown genuine, recent improvement even while regulatory breaches persist.
• The trust covers a very large, varied geography, from Teesside conurbations to rural North Yorkshire, offering staff a wide range of community and population settings within one employer.
• No HCAS applies anywhere in the trust's catchment, so total take-home pay comparisons against a London-based mental health trust need to account for that gap directly.
• The right approach is direct, specific questioning — ask at interview about staffing levels on the specific ward or team you'd join, what's changed since the events that prompted the statutory inquiry, and the most recent CQC findings for that named service, rather than relying on the trust-wide rating or reassurance alone.

Tools for working out your own numbers

Job title and trust name alone won't tell you what a specific role here is actually worth, or how this trust's current position compares with another employer you're considering — these three tools do that with your own numbers:

Your employer, not just your role

Tees, Esk and Wear Valleys 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.

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Frequently asked questions