On this website, you'll see mention of 'locations' – these are the services registered with us to provide care to you.
While, in most cases, these are fairly straightforward to understand, there are a couple of situations where the information you find on this website might not reflect how you think of the services in your area.
This is because of the legislation under which we operate, which sets out how we register the individuals, partnerships and organisations that run care services in your area.
The obvious ones...
With most services where care is provided from a particular site, you'll be able to find an entry for that place on this website.
For example, you should find these services registered at the address where you find them...
- your local hospital, hospice or clinic
- care or nursing homes in your area
- GP and dental practices (although branch surgeries will usually not be listed, instead these are considered part of the main site)
You can find all of these by searching using geographical information (such as the name of the city, town, village etc where the service is based or a postcode) and/or a keyword (such as part of the name).
Simple, right? Well, yes, but there is one issue you may face in finding the service you are looking for – multiple locations registered at one site.
What does this mean? Sometimes, there are multiple locations found on our website at the same address. This can happen for a few reasons...
- where there are several providers operating at a single site (for example if an NHS trust and a private healthcare company offer services from the same hospital) – when this happens, they have to register with us separately
- sometimes one provider will choose to register different services separately at the same site (for example, a large NHS trust may have its main hospital services and an ambulance or mental health service operating in one place but choose to list them as separate locations)
- when a location is deregistered (for example, if a hospital or care home is taken over by a different provider), its entry on our website is listed as 'archived' – we keep this information on our site so you can still find out about the history of care at a given site.
The not so obvious ones...
With services that are provided in people's homes or community settings, it's sometimes not so simple to find the report you're looking for as they are normally registered at the provider's headquarters.
This includes...
- home care agencies
- hospice at home
- district nurses
- health visitors
- community mental health services
With these types of service, geographical searches such as using your home postcode will not always prove fruitful as the headquarters will not always be positioned centrally, or even in, the catchment area served.
Therefore keyword searches and those focused on the providers are often most effective in finding the information you need.
Guidance for providers
If you're a service provider, you can find full details of what you should register as a location in our What is a location guidance.