What this is
The Care Quality Commission’s statutory annual report on the Mental Health Act, monitoring the Act for 2024 to 2025, published on 29 January 2026. Section 120 of the Mental Health Act 1983 requires the regulator to monitor how the Act is used and to report annually. Part of that duty is recording the deaths of detained patients that trusts notify to the CQC.
It is the only recurring, England-wide, published count of deaths occurring close to restraint in mental health inpatient care.
What it records
The report records 314 deaths notified to the CQC for 2024/25 (CQC, 29 January 2026). Of those, 253 were detained patients and 61 were patients on community treatment orders.
Fourteen of the 314 were deaths of detained patients “where it was recorded that the patient died within 7 days of restraint”, in the report’s own wording.
A further seven patients died during or within seven days of seclusion or time out, again as the report records it.
Forty-one of the 314 deaths were recorded as unnatural in the same table.
How to read it
The figure counts temporal proximity, and the CQC frames it that way: a death where restraint was recorded within the preceding seven days. It is not a finding that restraint caused any of those deaths, and the report makes no assessment of mechanism.
That distinction is the whole page. “Fourteen deaths within seven days of restraint” is a sentence you can quote. “Fourteen restraint deaths” is a different claim, and this document does not support it.
The second reading rule is about the denominator. Three hundred and fourteen is the number of deaths notified under the Act, not the number of deaths that occurred. Notification practice varies between trusts, and the report does not claim completeness.
Where it stops
One year, one nation, one recording route. The count is England-wide and covers detained patients; deaths of informal patients, of people in the community, and of people restrained in other settings are not in it.
Because it is the data owner’s own count, there is no second independent body corroborating the figure. Treat it as the best available official count, and cite it as the CQC’s, not as an established total.
The report does not break the fourteen down by sector, setting, age, ethnicity or restraint type in the published text summarised here, so no such breakdown should be inferred.
No causal claim is made, and this page makes none.
Sources
- Care Quality Commission, monitoring the Mental Health Act for 2024 to 2025, published 29 January 2026 · https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/697a3384c23c8fa26650dee5/cqc-monitoring-the-mental-health-act-in-2024-to-2025.pdf
- Care Quality Commission, same report, activity chapter · https://www.cqc.org.uk/publications/monitoring-mental-health-act/2024-2025/activity
If you are reviewing how often restraint is used in your service, and what happens after it, our restraint reduction training covers the recording, the review and the debrief.
Reviewed 20 October 2026.