About your profile page

Our website has a clear public focus. We want the public to understand who we are, what we do and how to find information about the quality of care.

Guidance and regulation

The site has a section for you – Guidance and regulation. This includes the information and guidance you need.

We also have a separate site – the Provider Portal – where you can make changes to your registration and send us notifications about events and changes. Most types of provider can now use this.

• Find out more about the Provider Portal
• Log in to the Provider Portal

Searching for a service

Visitors to our site can search and compare services, based on the judgements we have made. They can search in a variety of ways – by name, type of service or location. Once they have carried out a search, visitors can compare and choose services.

When we inspect a service, we normally rate them according to whether we judge the quality of their care to be 'outstanding', 'good', 'requires improvement' or 'inadequate'. However, there are some cases where don't publish a rating, or where we display tick or cross symbols instead.

Find out more about:

• ratings

From the results page, visitors can find out more about the services by clicking on their names.

Your profile page

CQC is legally required to provide the public with information about providers and their regulated activities.

Every provider registered with us has a profile page on this website. There is also a page for each of their locations. These pages include a summary of our latest judgements.

Your address

We publish all business and location addresses for registered providers.

If you use your home address as the address for your business or location, it will be published on our website.

You may believe an address needs to be confidential to protect people who use your service. In this exceptional circumstance you must email enquiries@cqc.org.uk to discuss.

Inspection reports and ratings

After we have inspected a location, we publish an overall summary and in most cases a rating. We publish individual ratings for how safe, effective, caring, responsive and well-led the service is. In some sectors we also publish ratings for specific services such as A&E or surgery.

When visitors click on an inspection area or a specific service, the panel opens to show a summary, a link to our latest inspection report and the date the report was published. Inspection reports are published within 14 days of the report being finalised following the factual accuracy check.

Displaying reports and ratings when services re-register

Services sometimes have to re-register even when they are continuing to provide the same services. For services that re-register from 1 April 2019 onwards, we display their latest report and ratings on the profile page. We will do this when a:

• location moves premises - it starts providing the same service from new premises
• provider changes its business structure - for example, from a partnership to an individual
• location is sold or taken over by new provider - this includes mergers and both NHS and non-NHS owned locations.

For services that re-registered for these reasons before 1 April 2019, we include a link between their old and new profile. Users can follow the link to find the history of our reports for that service.

Locations inspected up to 2014

Until 2014, our inspection approach measured compliance with 16 'essential standards'. We published our judgement on whether the service was meeting each of these.

We grouped the standards under five chapters. A tick shows compliance and a cross shows non-compliance.

When visitors click on a chapter, the panel opens to show our judgement for each of the standards, along with a summary and the date the standard was last checked. There is It also a link to the inspector's full report.

Each profile page also links to PDFs of previous reports about the location.

Keeping the website up to date

We gather other information on the profile page from a number of sources, including the information you submit when you applied for registration with us. Visitors can select tabs to see your registration information and contact details. They can also sign up to receive alerts when locations are inspected.

The information on your profile page reflects what is on your latest certificate. If you make a change to your registration (for example, add a new location) those details are added to the website once we generate your amended certificate. If you are registering and have received your Notice of Decision but not your certificate yet, your profile will display a simple statement. This confirms you are in the final stages of being registered and that we will publish your registration details shortly.