Briefing · Health and Social Care
Health and Social Care: inspections data monitor
A monitoring view of the Care Quality Commission's own published inspection and ratings data for health and social care providers in England.
This briefing accompanies the CQC case study in Regulating in an AI-Native Society and the CQC Constituency Explorer (members only).
Introduction
The Care Quality Commission (CQC) is the independent regulator of health and social care in England. This briefing uses CQC's own open data, published under the Open Government Licence v3.0, to summarise the number of premises it regulates, the date of each location's most recent inspection, and its rating where one has been published, cross-checked against a one-off bulk data extract of 56,616 locations. Of these, 31,770 carry a published Overall rating on CQC's four-band scale (Outstanding, Good, Requires Improvement, Inadequate). This rating applies mainly to CQC's core regulated sectors: adult social care (care homes and home care), GP practices, hospitals and hospices. Other providers, e.g. dentists and prison healthcare only rarely carry a rating under this specific framework. The reader should consult CQC for further information. This briefing covers England only: arrangements for health and social care regulation in Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales are devolved and fall outside CQC's remit, so are out of scope.
Analysis of CQC data
This section sets out seven figures built entirely from CQC's own published bulk data: a category breakdown of the full stock of locations (Figure 1), a cross-check of SDWH's reconstructed ratings stock against CQC's own published ratings count (Figures 2 and 3), inspection activity by year (Figure 4), and three category-level cuts of inspection recency, time since last inspection and rating bands (Figures 5 to 7). All draw on the full stock of CQC's currently published data across all time periods, not a live or day-by-day position, and update only when SDWH refreshes the underlying snapshot, not continuously.
A small number of these locations fall under the category “Other”: specialist services that sit outside CQC's standard published category list, dominated by two clusters — residential colleges providing combined education and residential care for young people with disabilities, autism or sensory impairment (for example Beaumont College, Portland College and Treloar College), and hyperbaric oxygen or diving medicine treatment centres (for example the Midlands Diving Chamber and the Centre for Defence Diving and Hyperbaric Medicine). Figure 1 below counts 13 locations under Other on a single-category basis; Figures 5 to 7 count 47, because they count a location once within every category it carries, so locations that combine Other with another category are counted there too.
Figure 1: CQC locations by category
| Category | Locations | % of total |
|---|---|---|
| Home care | 15,266 | 26.96% |
| Care homes | 14,337 | 25.32% |
| Dentists | 11,970 | 21.14% |
| GP services | 8,811 | 15.56% |
| Hospitals | 719 | 1.27% |
| Diagnostic/screening | 718 | 1.27% |
| Community services | 642 | 1.13% |
| Clinics | 615 | 1.09% |
| Ambulances | 349 | 0.62% |
| Hospices | 211 | 0.37% |
| Rehabilitation | 202 | 0.36% |
| Prison healthcare | 135 | 0.24% |
| Remote/phone advice | 57 | 0.10% |
| Urgent care | 55 | 0.10% |
| Blood and transplant | 18 | 0.03% |
| Other | 13 | 0.02% |
| Long-term conditions | 12 | 0.02% |
| Subtotal, 17 primary categories | 54,130 | 95.61% |
| Subtotal, 342 dual/multi-category rows (e.g. “Care homes, Home care”) | 2,486 | 4.39% |
| Grand total | 56,616 | 100.00% |
Each location is assigned a single primary category where it carries only one CQC service-type tag. The 342 distinct combinations of two or more tags (for example, a location tagged as both “Care homes” and “Home care”) are grouped as a separate subtotal rather than split across categories, so the rows above are mutually exclusive and sum exactly to the 56,616-location grand total, reconciled directly against SDWH's underlying bulk-data extract. This differs from the counting convention used in Figures 5 to 7, which count a location once within every category it carries.
Source: CQC bulk care directory data, licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0; analysis by SDWH Limited.
Two datasets, one cross-check. Figures 2 and 3 below, together with the category-level charts in Figures 4 to 7, are built entirely from SDWH's examination of CQC's bulk data downloads, after cleansing the data to categorise it cleanly: the full care directory and ratings extract, independently parsed and joined by SDWH, with no reliance on any summary statistic CQC itself publishes. As a check on that reconstruction, SDWH separately recorded a count CQC does publish directly on its own website: a running total of ratings issued in the past month, based on a review on 23 July 2026. The two datasets cover different populations over different time windows, set out in Figures 2 and 3 below.
Figure 2: Two CQC ratings datasets compared
| Dataset | Source and method | Observations | Time period covered |
|---|---|---|---|
| SDWH's national ratings stock | CQC's public bulk downloads (care directory and ratings extract, ~1GB uncompressed as XML), independently parsed, joined by name and postcode, and resolved to constituency by SDWH; no CQC-published summary statistics used as an input | 56,616 locations; 31,770 with a published Overall rating | Snapshot as at 1 July 2026 (ratings) / 22 July 2026 (care directory) |
| CQC's own published count | Read directly from the ratings count CQC displays on its own website (cqc.org.uk), viewed 23 July 2026 | 628 ratings | Ratings published in the preceding month |
Source: CQC bulk care directory and ratings data, and CQC's own published ratings count (cqc.org.uk), both licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0; analysis by SDWH Limited.
Figure 3: Rating bands, both datasets
| Dataset | Outstanding | Good | Requires improvement | Inadequate |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| SDWH's national ratings stock (rated locations only) | 4.9% | 82.0% | 12.5% | 0.6% |
| CQC's own published count (past month) | 4.3% | 73.4% | 19.6% | 2.7% |
The two rows are not directly comparable line-for-line — one is a full national stock of currently-held ratings, the other a rolling monthly count of newly-published ratings — but both are read off the same four-band CQC rating scale. That an entirely independent reconstruction from raw public bulk data, with no privileged access and no use of CQC's own summary statistics, lands in a broadly similar range to what CQC itself publishes is a useful corroboration of the analysis in this case study.
Source: CQC bulk care directory and ratings data, licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0; analysis by SDWH Limited.
Figure 4: locations by year of latest inspection, by category
2016–2026 · 42,283 categorised locations with a recorded inspection date · 2026 is a partial year (to the 22 July 2026 snapshot); 2010–2015 excluded as too sparse to be reliable
Nationwide count of locations by calendar year (1 January–31 December) of their most recent CQC inspection, broken down by category. The earliest inspection date included is 5 January 2016 and the latest is 22 July 2026, the date of the underlying care-directory snapshot, so 2026 is a partial year of just under seven months. CQC's bulk download records only the latest inspection date per location, not a full inspection history, so this is a proxy for inspection activity rather than a literal count of every inspection carried out. The 2020 dip across Care homes and Home care coincides with reduced on-site CQC inspection during the pandemic. Locations can carry more than one category, so category counts sum to slightly more than the number of distinct locations inspected each year. Explore this data further in the CQC Constituency Explorer (members only — please use the contact form to request access).
Source: CQC bulk care directory data, licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0; analysis by SDWH Limited.
Inspection Recency by Category
Nationwide share of locations in each category by inspection recency band, using the same recent/due/overdue definitions as the CQC Constituency Explorer map (members only). Each bar totals 100%; locations can carry more than one category, so are counted once within each category they belong to.
The four bands are: Recently inspected — more than 90 days from its target review date; Due soon — within 90 days of that target review date, but not yet past it; Overdue — past that target review date; and No inspection date — no inspection date recorded at all in CQC's bulk download. Target review dates are set from CQC's own published intervals, applied to each location's current rating: 6 months following an Inadequate rating, 12 months following Requires Improvement, 30 months following Good or Outstanding, or 24 months as a default where no rating is held, per CQC's own published guidance.
Figure 5: inspection recency, 100% stacked by category
All 56,616 categorised locations nationwide, current snapshot
Categories are ordered by total location count (largest first). "No inspection date" covers locations with no recorded inspection in CQC's bulk download, which is concentrated in categories such as diagnostic/screening and remote/phone advice services that are less likely to receive a traditional on-site visit.
Source: CQC bulk care directory data, licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0; analysis by SDWH Limited.
Time Since Last Inspection by Category
The same nationwide population, banded instead by a fixed, category-independent measure of time since each location's last recorded inspection — not by CQC's rating-dependent target intervals, which is what Figure 5 uses. Each bar totals 100% of that category's locations.
Figure 6: time since last inspection, 100% stacked by category, fixed time bands
All 56,616 categorised locations nationwide · measured against the 22 July 2026 care-directory snapshot date · ordered by total location count (largest first)
Bands are fixed calendar-time thresholds (under 6 months, 6–12 months, 1–2 years, 2–5 years, 5+ years, never inspected), applied the same way to every category regardless of its rating or CQC's target inspection interval for that rating. This is a different cut of the same underlying data to Figure 5's recency-by-category chart: that one measures each location against its own rating-dependent due date, this one measures every location against the same fixed clock.
Source: CQC bulk care directory data, licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0; analysis by SDWH Limited.
Rating Bands by Category
Among locations that CQC has actually rated on its Overall five-key-question scale, the share falling into each rating band, by category. Each bar totals 100% of that category's rated locations only — it excludes not-rated locations, so is not directly comparable to Figure 5's recency chart.
Figure 7: CQC rating bands, 100% stacked by category, rated locations only
31,770 rated locations nationwide · ordered by number of rated locations in that category (largest first)
Rated-location counts vary hugely by category, from 13,773 (care homes) down to single figures. Dentists (57 rated), Other (34), Blood and transplant (24) and Prison healthcare (8) are based on very small samples, and a handful of ratings can shift their bars substantially; treat these four as indicative only, not statistically robust. Care homes, home care and GP services have the largest, most reliable rated samples.
Source: CQC bulk care directory data, licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0; analysis by SDWH Limited.
Methodology
Locations and providers are drawn from CQC's public care directory (22 July 2026 snapshot). Ratings are drawn from CQC's published Overall-domain ratings (1 July 2026 snapshot) — only locations assessed under CQC's five-key-question framework carry an Overall rating; most other service types show as not rated on this specific scale, not necessarily unassessed by CQC more generally. Postcodes are resolved to their current (2024 boundary review) Westminster parliamentary constituency via postcodes.io, itself built on ONS's National Statistics Postcode Lookup. Each location's raw CQC service-type tags are grouped into a short set of categories (Care homes, GP services, Dentists, Home care, Hospitals, Hospices, Clinics, Community services, Ambulances, and others) aligned to CQC's own published "Services we regulate" categories, rather than shown as CQC's internal, sometimes duplicated tag combinations.
A single location in this dataset (IV Wet Room Ltd, a mobile IV-drip wellness service) carries a Cardiff postcode and so falls in a Welsh constituency, despite CQC's remit otherwise covering England only. This is not a postcode-resolution error — the provider is genuinely registered with and regulated by CQC from a Cardiff base, per CQC's own published register — so it is retained rather than excluded.
This page presents SDWH's Health and Social Care: inspections data monitor (27 July 2026, v1.0). SDWH Limited is a management consultancy registered in England and Wales (company number 17048595). This briefing is produced by SDWH Limited for general information. It does not constitute regulated financial advice and SDWH Limited is not authorised or regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority.
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Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0; analysis by SDWH Limited.