UK Care Services Register Scraper (CQC)

Scrape the official register of every regulated health and social care service in England, sourced directly from the Care Quality Commission (CQC) — the UK government body that regulates and inspects every health and social care provider in the country. Covers care homes, homecare (domiciliary care) agencies, GP practices, dentists, hospitals, hospices, ambulance services, community health services, and 20+ other CQC-defined service types in one dataset. Search by service type, region, local authority, care specialism, keyword or postcode, and optionally fetch each service's official inspection rating (Outstanding / Good / Requires improvement / Inadequate). No login, no API key, no proxy required.

What this actor does

• Two modes: search (filter the full register) and byLocationIds (look up specific services by their CQC Location ID, always enriched with ratings)
• 31 CQC service types — care homes, homecare agencies, GP/doctors surgeries, dentists, hospitals, mental health hospitals, hospices, ambulances, community services, urgent care, prison healthcare, and more
• Filters: keyword (name), provider/operator name, service type, region, local authority, care specialism/need, postcode area, has-website-only, has-phone-only
• Rating filter: restrict results to a specific CQC overall rating (e.g. only Outstanding services)
• Official inspection ratings: Overall, Safe, Effective, Caring, Responsive, Well-led — straight from CQC's own published assessments (where CQC assigns one — not every service type is star-rated)
• Sorting: alphabetical, most-recently-inspected-first, or by region
• Always fresh: the register export is re-downloaded from CQC every run (CQC republishes it daily)
• Empty fields are omitted — every record only contains what CQC actually published for that service

Output per care service

Field	Description
name	Registered service name
alsoKnownAs	Trading/brand name, if different from the registered name
address	Street address
postcode	UK postcode
fullAddress	Address + postcode combined
phone	UK phone number
website	Service or provider website
serviceTypes[]	CQC-defined type(s), e.g. Nursing homes, Doctors/GPs, Dentist, Hospital
specialisms[]	Care needs supported, e.g. Dementia, Physical disabilities
providerName	Operating company / charity / NHS trust name
providerId, providerUrl	CQC provider ID and profile page
localAuthority	Local authority area
region	CQC region (9 English regions, plus Wales for the small number of cross-border providers CQC also lists)
latestInspectionDate	Date of CQC's most recent inspection (ISO date)
locationId	CQC Location ID
locationUrl / sourceUrl	Canonical CQC page for this service
overallRating *	Outstanding / Good / Requires improvement / Inadequate
ratingSafe, ratingEffective, ratingCaring, ratingResponsive, ratingWellLed *	The 5 official CQC assessment categories
reportPublishedDate *	Date the latest inspection report was published
reportUrl *	Link to the full inspection report
registeredManagers[] *	Named registered manager(s) on file
nominatedIndividuals[] *	Named nominated individual(s) on file (the provider's board-level lead responsible for CQC compliance at this service)
recordType	Always careService
scrapedAt	UTC timestamp of the scrape

* Only present when ratings are fetched — see includeRatings below — and when CQC assigns that service type a domain rating at all (dentists, for example, are inspected but not star-rated, so these fields are simply omitted rather than showing a fabricated value). Always fetched for mode=byLocationIds.

Input

Field	Type	Default	Description
mode	select	search	search or byLocationIds
keyword	string	–	Substring match on name / "also known as"
providerName	string	–	Substring match on provider/operator name
serviceType	select	–	One of 31 CQC service types, e.g. Doctors/GPs, Homecare agencies, Dentist, Hospital
region	select	–	CQC region
localAuthority	select	–	One of 156 local authorities
specialism	select	–	One of 12 CQC-listed specialisms (e.g. Dementia)
postcodeArea	string	–	Postcode prefix match, e.g. NE31, SW1
sortBy	select	name	name (A-Z), latestInspectionDateDesc, or regionAsc
includeRatings	boolean	false	Fetch each result's official CQC rating (capped at 60 fetches/run)
overallRatingFilter	select	–	Keep only services rated e.g. Outstanding, or notRated for services CQC doesn't domain-rate (auto-enables rating enrichment)
hasWebsiteOnly	boolean	false	Only keep services with a website on file
hasPhoneOnly	boolean	false	Only keep services with a phone number on file
lastPublishedFilter	select	–	Only keep services last inspected week (7 days) or month (30 days) ago
locationIds	array	–	CQC Location IDs or URLs (mode=byLocationIds)
maxItems	integer	20	Hard cap on emitted records (1–500)

Example: outstanding-rated GP practices in London

{
  "mode": "search",
  "serviceType": "Doctors/GPs",
  "region": "London",
  "overallRatingFilter": "Outstanding",
  "maxItems": 25
}

Example: homecare agencies for dementia care, with contact details required

{
  "mode": "search",
  "serviceType": "Homecare agencies",
  "specialism": "Dementia",
  "hasWebsiteOnly": true,
  "hasPhoneOnly": true,
  "maxItems": 50
}

Example: all services run by a specific provider

{
  "mode": "search",
  "providerName": "Bupa",
  "sortBy": "latestInspectionDateDesc",
  "maxItems": 100
}

Example: recently-inspected services with no domain rating published

{
  "mode": "search",
  "serviceType": "Dentist",
  "overallRatingFilter": "notRated",
  "lastPublishedFilter": "month",
  "maxItems": 50
}

Example: look up specific services by CQC Location ID

{
  "mode": "byLocationIds",
  "locationIds": [
    "1-10557588274",
    "https://www.cqc.org.uk/location/1-10564001398"
  ]
}

Use cases

• Care research & comparison — build a shortlist of highly-rated services in a specific area, service type or specialism
• Lead generation — identify care providers, GP practices, dentists, or homecare agencies by region, local authority, or operator group
• Market research — analyse the density and quality distribution of health and social care provision across England
• Compliance monitoring — track inspection dates and ratings for services you operate or oversee
• Family/carer decision support — compare nearby services on official ratings before choosing care

FAQ

Where does this data come from? Directly from CQC's own public transparency data — the same regulator-verified register CQC publishes for public download every day. This is the official UK government source of truth for registered health and social care providers, not a third-party aggregator.

Does this cover all of the UK? CQC regulates England only. Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland have their own regulators (Care Inspectorate, CIW, RQIA) — a small number of cross-border providers registered under Wales do appear in CQC's own export and are included as-is, but this is not a Welsh-regulator dataset.

What service types are covered? All 31 that CQC's directory export lists, including (but not limited to) Nursing homes, Residential homes, Homecare agencies, Doctors/GPs, Dentist, Hospital, Hospitals - Mental health/capacity, Hospice, Ambulances, Community services - Healthcare, Supported living, Urgent care centres, and Prison healthcare. Leave serviceType blank to search across all of them at once.

Why do some services have no rating? CQC only assigns a Good/Outstanding-style overall rating to certain service types after an inspection (adult social care, GP practices, hospitals, homecare, etc). Dentists and a few other service types are inspected but are not given this style of rating by CQC — for those, overallRating and the 5 domain ratings are omitted rather than showing a fabricated or misleading value. Newly registered services without a published assessment yet will also have these fields omitted.

How current is the data? The base register (name, address, provider, specialisms) is CQC's daily-refreshed export. Ratings are fetched live from each service's CQC page at the time you run the actor.

Why is includeRatings capped at 60 fetches per run? Fetching a rating requires one extra page load per service. The cap keeps runs fast and reliable; use mode=byLocationIds for guaranteed per-service rating lookups regardless of this cap. overallRatingFilter uses a wider internal scan budget since it actively searches for rating matches.

Can I search by exact postcode? postcodeArea matches on prefix (e.g. NE31 matches NE31 1YQ). For an exact single address lookup, use keyword with the service's name instead.

Limitations

• Archived / deregistered locations are not included. This actor's search mode draws from CQC's daily "Care directory" export, which covers currently-registered (active) locations only (~94,000 as of writing). CQC separately publishes a much larger "Deactivated locations" file (~92,000 records, ~26MB) covering services that have since closed or re-registered — but that file is only available as a large .ods spreadsheet, not CSV, and parsing it reliably within a single actor run was judged too memory-risky to add in this pass. If you need historical/closed-service lookups, download CQC's "Deactivated locations" file directly from their transparency page.
• mode=byLocationIds also only resolves active registrations for the same reason — a Location ID belonging to an archived/deregistered service will return ratings-page data if the detail page still exists, but base fields (address, provider, etc.) will be empty since they come from the same active-only directory export.