On 17 July 2026, NHS England published its new Mental Health Personalised Care Framework
New NHS England guidance promises personalised care, relational continuity and a stronger voice for people using mental health services. CHARM considers what it should mean in practice—and why recent deaths show that Greater Manchester cannot treat it as another policy exercise.
On 17 July 2026, NHS England published its Mental Health Personalised Care Framework, describing it as the “modern care programme approach”.
The framework attempts to restore essential protections that have been weakened or applied inconsistently since services began moving away from the traditional Care Programme Approach, or CPA.
At its best, the CPA was intended to ensure that a person had a clear plan, someone responsible for coordinating it and regular opportunities to review whether their care was working. In practice, it too often became a bureaucratic process concerned with forms, thresholds and compliance rather than relationships, rights and meaningful support.
NHS England now acknowledges that the 2019 Community Mental Health Framework removed the general care coordinator role without providing sufficiently clear guidance about how care should subsequently be coordinated. This left many services struggling to implement the new arrangements and contributed to inconsistency across the country.
The new framework seeks to correct that gap.
