University Hospitals of Derby and Burton NHS Foundation Trust: The Complete Guide

The trust and its hospital sites

University Hospitals of Derby and Burton NHS Foundation Trust is the main acute NHS employer across Derby, Burton upon Trent and a wide surrounding catchment stretching into South Staffordshire, Tamworth and Lichfield. It runs five named hospital sites, each with a distinct role, plus a number of smaller outpatient and community satellite locations:

Beyond those five main sites, the trust's own "Find our hospitals" page also lists a set of smaller outpatient and community-facing locations — St Oswald's Hospital, Long Eaton Health Centre, Heanor Memorial Health Centre, Ilkeston Community Hospital and Ripley Community Hospital — reflecting a deliberate strategy of keeping routine and outpatient care closer to patients across a genuinely wide geography rather than centralising everything on the two acute sites. If a role at UHDB is based at, or rotates between, several of these locations, that's a rostering and travel question rather than a pay one — see our pay section below.

History: the 2018 Derby–Burton merger

UHDB in its current form is younger than many candidates assume. Before 1 July 2018, Derby's hospitals and Burton's Queen's Hospital were run by two entirely separate organisations: Derby Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, which included Royal Derby Hospital, and Burton Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, which ran Queen's Hospital. The two foundation trusts merged on that date to form University Hospitals of Derby and Burton NHS Foundation Trust, bringing both acute sites and their respective community hospital services under one trust board and one employer for the first time.

That matters practically as well as historically: continuous service, employment terms and any redundancy pay calculations run from your UHDB contract as the single legal employer across every site, not from whichever legacy Derby or Burton institution a department originally belonged to. If you're applying today, it's worth knowing that "UHDB" as a combined organisation is a little under a decade old, even though Royal Derby Hospital itself — which opened in its current PFI-built form in 2010 — and Queen's Hospital Burton each have their own longer institutional histories predating the merger.

What makes UHDB distinctive

Scale alone doesn't tell you much about day-to-day working life, so it's worth being specific about what's genuinely distinctive about UHDB, rather than relying on generic "large teaching hospital" language — and equally worth being honest about what we couldn't independently confirm, rather than inventing a list of named centres of excellence to sound impressive.

• Physical home of the University of Nottingham's graduate-entry medicine programme. Royal Derby Hospital doesn't just host occasional placements from Nottingham — it's the site of the University of Nottingham Medical School's graduate-entry medicine teaching facility itself, meaning students on that programme are taught and based there day-to-day. For staff involved in undergraduate or graduate medical education, that's a genuinely embedded academic relationship rather than a distant affiliation on paper.
• A large, purpose-built main acute site. Royal Derby Hospital opened in its current form in 2010, built under a roughly £333 million PFI contract with Skanska. Secondary sources (Wikipedia, not independently re-verified by us) put it at more than 1,100 acute beds, around 35 operating theatres, and 200 single en-suite patient rooms — a scale and specification well above the typical district general hospital, though we'd encourage treating the precise bed figure as approximate rather than a confirmed live count.
• Derbyshire Children's Hospital, co-located at Royal Derby. Paediatric inpatient and specialist children's services sit on the same site as Royal Derby's adult acute services, rather than at a separate stand-alone children's hospital elsewhere in the region.
• Genuine two-site acute rotation breadth. Royal Derby (larger, more sub-specialised) and Queen's Hospital Burton (a district general hospital in its own right, with its own emergency department) give staff meaningfully different working environments within a single employer, on top of placements across the trust's three community hospitals — a practical advantage for anyone wanting variety without changing trusts.
• A large, genuinely mixed catchment. UHDB serves Derby city, the wider county of Derbyshire, Burton-on-Trent, and reaches into South Staffordshire, Tamworth and Lichfield through its community hospital sites — a combined population base that spans both a mid-sized city and a substantial semi-rural and market-town hinterland.

One honest caveat: we could not independently verify specific tertiary or regional-referral specialisms at UHDB with a primary source we're confident in, in the way we can for, say, Nottingham's major trauma centre or Birmingham's transplant programme. If a named "centre of excellence" claim for UHDB shows up elsewhere, we'd treat it cautiously until you can trace it to the trust's own current published material, and we haven't invented one here to fill the gap.

CQC rating: a genuinely mixed, current picture

This is the section where a lazy answer would do UHDB — and you — a disservice, so we're going to be precise rather than reach for a single headline word.

UHDB's last full, trust-wide comprehensive CQC inspection is dated 16 June 2021, and rated the trust Good overall, including Good for the well-led domain. That rating is still what CQC's own provider overview page for the trust displays as the headline "Overall" figure. The problem is that it's now stale in practice: CQC has since shifted to assessing and publishing ratings for individual hospital locations and services separately, on a rolling basis, rather than only refreshing a single trust-wide number — and several of those more recent, location-level assessments tell a noticeably different and more mixed story than "Good" alone would suggest.

• Queen's Hospital Burton — overall rating: Requires Improvement, published 4 September 2026 (CQC location code RTGX1). Broken down by domain: Safe — Requires Improvement; Effective — Requires Improvement; Caring — Good; Responsive — Good; Well-led — Good.
• Maternity at Queen's Hospital Burton: Requires Improvement overall, published 7 November 2025.
• Maternity at Royal Derby Hospital: per legal and news secondary sources (Freeths, Staffordshire Live, and Nelsons Law all report on this), maternity was rated Inadequate in 2023, and improved to Requires Improvement following a December 2024 inspection (with the report itself referenced as published 7 November 2025). Inspectors reportedly continued to flag concerns about the safety of women and babies, leadership visibility, and staff not always feeling able to speak up. We were not able to load CQC's own location page for Royal Derby (RTGFG) directly to confirm this first-hand — it returned an access error when we checked — so we're presenting this specific figure with that caveat rather than stating it as independently primary-sourced.
• Outpatients and diagnostic imaging at both main sites: Good, following inspections in November 2025 — per UHDB's own news coverage, which (understandably, as trust communications) covers this improvement without mentioning the maternity findings above.
• Critical care at both main sites: Good, after a March 2025 inspection — Queen's Hospital Burton's critical care specifically improved from Requires Improvement to Good in that inspection.

Put plainly: UHDB's last full trust-wide inspection (2021) rated it Good overall and Good for well-led — and that's still the headline figure CQC's own summary page shows. But under CQC's newer, location-by-location approach, the more current picture is mixed. Several services — critical care, outpatients, diagnostic imaging — have genuinely improved to Good in 2025. Maternity services at both main hospitals, by contrast, were rated Inadequate and have since improved only as far as Requires Improvement, with well-led and safety culture in maternity specifically still a live area of scrutiny. Queen's Hospital Burton's current overall rating, as of September 2026, is Requires Improvement. We'd rather give you that fuller, more current picture than repeat the stale "Good" headline on its own.

The 2025 NHS Staff Survey: the honest picture

FrontlinePay's editorial position is that a fair trust page reports what staff themselves said in the most recent national survey, not just the headline a trust chooses to promote. The 2025 NHS Staff Survey benchmark report for University Hospitals of Derby and Burton NHS Foundation Trust (organisation code RTG, published by the NHS Staff Survey Coordination Centre) recorded 8,153 completed questionnaires, a 54% response rate — comfortably above the 47% average across its benchmarking group of 121 Acute and Acute & Community trusts nationally, which between them logged 524,528 completed responses.

Across the nine People Promise elements and themes the survey measures on a 0-10 scale, UHDB's scores sit slightly below the benchmarking-group average on nearly every measure — without being a serious outlier on any single one:

Source: NHS Staff Survey Coordination Centre, 2025 NHS Staff Survey Benchmark Report for University Hospitals of Derby and Burton NHS Foundation Trust (organisation code RTG). Scores are on a 0-10 scale, where higher is more positive.

Read plainly, this is a genuinely middling result — UHDB isn't a standout on any theme, but it isn't a serious outlier at the bottom of its benchmarking group either. The weakest relative area is "We are always learning" (5.32 vs a 5.57 group average), driven in part by a below-average appraisals sub-score of 4.46 against a 4.89 group average — worth asking about directly if structured appraisal and development support specifically matter to your decision.

Culture, safety and governance: the honest picture

Beyond the staff survey, two further points are worth setting out plainly rather than glossing over.

First, the maternity safety concerns covered in the CQC section above are a genuine, ongoing issue, not a historical footnote. The trajectory — Inadequate in 2023, improving only to Requires Improvement by 2024/25 — with inspectors still citing unsafe induction practices, inconsistent leadership visibility, ineffective handovers, and staff not always feeling able to speak up, is a real and current pattern of concern specifically within maternity services at both main hospitals. It sits alongside genuine improvement elsewhere in the trust (critical care, outpatients, diagnostics), which is exactly why we've avoided reducing UHDB's overall position to a single word above.

Second, UHDB (in its Derby Teaching Hospitals predecessor form) was found by the Court of Appeal in 2019 to have breached the 2002 junior doctors' contract, by underestimating doctors' actual working hours and rest periods through the way its commercial rostering software was configured. It's a specific, confirmed legal finding worth being aware of if working hours and rest-period compliance matter to your decision, rather than a vague or unsubstantiated allegation.

We found no evidence of UHDB currently being in CQC special measures. We also could not verify a specific current financial deficit figure for the trust, and we're not going to attribute one to UHDB without a source we trust — though it's worth knowing as general context that NHS trusts nationally have overwhelmingly been reporting financial deficits across 2024/25 and into 2025/26, a sector-wide pressure that isn't unique to UHDB.

Pay and HCAS at UHDB

Every Agenda for Change band at UHDB matches the national scale exactly — see our 2026/27 pay scales guide. Derby and Burton both sit within the East Midlands, a region that is entirely outside the High Cost Area Supplement (HCAS) zones. HCAS exists specifically to reflect the unusually high cost of living in and immediately around London, and is defined by postcode-area zones — Inner London, Outer London and London Fringe — not by a trust's size, the number of sites it covers, or the population it serves. That means pay at UHDB is the standard national Agenda for Change rate, identical band-for-band to any other trust outside an HCAS zone, whether you're based at Royal Derby, Queen's Hospital Burton, or one of the trust's community hospital sites. Doctors and dentists sit outside Agenda for Change entirely, on their own national contract, so this doesn't change based on site or region either.

University Hospitals of Derby and Burton NHS Foundation Trust, not the NHS as a single organisation, is your legal employer across every site it runs, which is what continuous service and, where relevant, redundancy pay calculations are based on — a role that rotates between Royal Derby and a community hospital site, for example, doesn't change employer or reset continuous service. As a broad acute and community trust, UHDB covers the usual full range of roles: nursing across most fields, medicine, midwifery, allied health professions, pharmacy, healthcare science, and the healthcare assistant, administrative and estates staff needed to run services across five main sites and several smaller satellite locations. Our nursing and allied health professionals guides walk through how pay progresses at each band, and that applies here as much as at any other acute trust.

UHDB vs Nottingham: how the scale compares

It's useful to size UHDB against the region's dominant specialist tertiary trust rather than judging it in isolation. Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust sits roughly 15 miles from Derby and shares the same East Midlands, non-HCAS pay region — but the two trusts are not equivalent in scale or role, and it's more honest to say so plainly than to imply a closer comparison than the facts support.

The honest headline: UHDB is materially smaller than Nottingham University Hospitals and doesn't carry comparable tertiary-referral status — no major trauma centre, no transplant programme, nothing at the scale of Nottingham's three NIHR research centres. What UHDB does have, distinctively, is the physical base of the University of Nottingham's own graduate-entry medicine programme at Royal Derby — an interesting reversal, in a sense, given Nottingham's own dominance on paper. A planned 2016 merger between Nottingham University Hospitals and Sherwood Forest Hospitals was abandoned over a dispute about PFI liabilities, which is worth knowing as regional context: East Midlands trust structure has shifted more than once in the last decade, and UHDB's own 2018 merger sits within that same wider pattern of consolidation attempts, some completed and some not. Neither trust is objectively "better" from scale figures alone — the right fit depends on specialty, site and the specific department you'd be joining, which the tools below are built to help with in more depth than trust-level statistics can.

Training, research and career progression

UHDB's clearest training distinctive is also its most concrete one: Royal Derby Hospital is the physical site of the University of Nottingham Medical School's graduate-entry medicine programme, not merely a placement destination. For staff involved in undergraduate medical education, that means a genuinely embedded, day-to-day academic presence on-site — students taught and based at Royal Derby itself — rather than a distant "affiliated teaching hospital" relationship that exists mostly on paper. Combined with the co-located Derbyshire Children's Hospital, staff at Royal Derby specifically get meaningful exposure to both undergraduate medical teaching and paediatric specialist services within a single site.

Working across UHDB more broadly gives genuine two-site acute rotation breadth: Royal Derby, the larger and more sub-specialised of the two acute sites, alongside Queen's Hospital Burton, a district general hospital in its own right with its own emergency department — plus placements across three community hospitals covering Derby, Tamworth and Lichfield. For staff who want variety in setting and case mix without relocating away from the East Midlands, that combination is a genuine practical advantage over a single-site district general hospital, where rotation options are inherently more limited.

The honest caveat that applies to any trust of this size also applies here: structured rotation and training programmes tend to be more developed where teaching relationships are already embedded — as at Royal Derby — but actual day-to-day experience still depends heavily on the specific department and team you join. Given the genuine, ongoing maternity safety concerns covered above, that's especially worth researching directly — including via current or recent staff — for anyone applying into maternity, neonatal or obstetric services specifically, rather than assuming trust-wide scale or a strong teaching reputation in one part of the trust guarantees the same experience everywhere within it.

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The bottom line

University Hospitals of Derby and Burton combines a genuinely distinctive academic asset — the physical home of the University of Nottingham's graduate-entry medicine programme at Royal Derby, alongside the co-located Derbyshire Children's Hospital — with an honest, mixed and currently unresolved safety picture in maternity services at both main hospitals, sitting next to real, verified improvement in critical care, outpatients and diagnostics. It's a materially smaller organisation than Nottingham University Hospitals, without comparable tertiary-referral status, but a genuinely broad, two-site acute and three-site community employer across a wide East Midlands catchment. None of these facts should be hidden behind any of the others. Whether it's the right move for you still depends on specialty fit and the specific department you'd be joining, which is exactly what the tools above are built to help you weigh with real information rather than assumption.

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