What happened
The Care Quality Commission inspected St Andrew’s Healthcare’s Northampton hospital, an independent mental health hospital, in July and August 2025. It published reports on three services on 12 December 2025.
The inspection followed an incident the hospital reported itself: an alleged assault by a member of staff on a patient.
On a ward for people with learning disabilities and autism, inspectors watched CCTV of staff kicking and hitting a patient during a restraint while colleagues watched. One could be seen smiling at the camera. The patient’s airway was restricted and they were hit in the face with an open hand.
Seventeen staff were present. None raised a concern.
Inspectors reviewed 26 more CCTV incidents: twelve raised concerns about care and treatment, six were “high level”. Staff were seen leaning on a patient’s joints and pushing them forward with pressure on the back. Patients were held down by the chest with a technique the regulator deemed dangerous, on one occasion for 75 minutes.
The outcome
The CQC identified 14 breaches of regulation covering person-centred care, safe care and treatment, safeguarding, dignity and respect, good management and staffing, and required an action plan.
It restricted new admissions through an urgent condition on the registration, and later added more. The overall rating remained inadequate and the service stayed in special measures. Wards for older people and the forensic and secure wards were again rated inadequate.
No legal outcome is recorded.
What went wrong
The technique failures and the silence around them are one finding, not two: records showed people restrained in positions that contradicted national advice, and incidents of inappropriate restraint that had caused harm.
The CQC’s deputy director of mental health, Craig Howarth, described “evidence of closed cultures on wards and several other incidents which were improper, abusive, inappropriate and unsafe”.
A ward where seventeen people watch an assault and none reports it has stopped treating reporting as part of the job.
What it teaches
Every person in the room is part of the intervention. The technique can be taught in a day. The willingness to say stop is what a trainer is actually building, and this CCTV shows what its absence looks like at scale.
Duration recurs in this sector: here it is 75 minutes on a chest hold the regulator had already judged dangerous. A hold that has no named person responsible for ending it does not end.
The third lesson is repetition. Earlier inspections had found restraint problems at this provider; when the same finding returns, what is missing is not an improvement plan but the thing the plan was meant to change.
Questions for the room
- Seventeen staff present, no concern raised. What would you have done, and what would have made it possible?
- A colleague is holding a patient by the chest and it has gone past a minute. What do you say, and when?
- Leaders were told about restraint problems in earlier inspections. What does repetition tell you about an improvement plan?
Evidence and limits
Confidence: confirmed. The CQC press release and the BBC’s report of 12 December 2025 were both read and agree on the incident, the figures and the enforcement action.
The BBC reports a police inquiry into allegations which does not appear in the CQC release, and no outcome of it is recorded here. The CQC’s full inspection reports were not opened, so the detail rests on its press release and the press account.
No member of staff is named and no finding is made about any individual. The findings are the regulator’s, and the page is written as a citation of that document. One detail is deliberately softened: the source describes a patient’s state when dragged into seclusion; this page says “partly undressed”, because the point is the practice, not the exposure.
Our physical interventions training covers the holds in this case, and the monitoring that has to go with them.
Sources
Reviewed 20 October 2026.