South London and Maudsley (SLaM) NHS Foundation Trust, which provides mental health services for over 1.3 million people across Croydon, Lambeth, Lewisham, and Southwark, has detailed its improvement plan after being downgraded from 'Good' to 'Requires Improvement' by the Care Quality Commission (CQC) earlier in 2026. The CQC inspection, conducted between June and October 2025, found issues including high waiting times, poor working relationships, and concerns over workplace culture and trust.
Key changes and early results
At a meeting with Lewisham Council's Healthier Communities Select Committee on June 30, 2026, Adeniyi Aderinto, Service Director for SLaM's Lewisham and Addiction Services, reported that the trust has been redesigning its community structure and is already seeing improvements. He stated: 'For Lewisham especially, we're beginning to see a reduction of our bed usage, our patient satisfaction increase, our involvement with our wider community services to ensure that we are listening to them. We are beginning to see our referrals for patients being referred to us, seen within 28 days at a very quicker rate. We are beginning to see that we are trying to reduce our time of our patients in emergency department to ensure we are offering the best care that we can and as soon as possible.'
New 24-hour Guardian Service for staff
Aderinto also announced the launch of 'The Guardian Service,' a 24-hour external hotline where staff can anonymously report safety or discrimination concerns. He said: 'It's a 24-hour service and independent of the Trust completely. So they can't actually raise those issues with us, or if they want to be anonymous in what they give to us then they can. We also have a staff forum in Lewisham where staff are allowed to come and ask questions. No question is stupid. And they can actually send it to us at any given time.'
Health Based Place of Safety improvements
Hugh Williams, Associate Medical Director, highlighted developments at the Health Based Place of Safety (HBPoS) at Maudsley Hospital, which provides a space for people detained under Section 135/136 of the Mental Health Act 1983. He explained: 'One of the developments is that they've implemented a swing bed model so that patients can be detained there and treated there. Before there were some questions around the sort of legal status of people there, particularly when they'd gone past the period of 136 and hadn't been moved into a bed.' The trust plans to introduce a garden at HBPoS and improve staff mandatory training.
Action Plan and other initiatives
The trust submitted an Action Plan in March 2026 addressing the CQC's 15 identified areas of improvement. Key initiatives include a new policy providing protected funding and additional working hours for staff networks (race, disability, sexual orientation) to shape hospital decisions, an overhaul of safety investigations with cleared backlogs and retrained teams, and involving doctors and nurses in designing a new electronic patient record system. Senior executives are conducting more frequent site visits to engage with frontline staff. The committee requested an update from the trust in six months to a year.
