Scotland Care Inspectorate Care Service Portfolio Monitor

Watch named Scottish registered care services by Care Inspectorate service number (CS##########) against the official Care Inspectorate care service directory and its monthly Care Services Open Datastore. Get one event when a service on your list is cancelled or goes inactive, changes provider, has its quality grades downgraded, receives an enforcement or has a complaint upheld.

Quick start: replace the example csNumbers with your services, set sourceMode = live, then save as a Task and schedule it daily or weekly. No API key needed.

Who this is for:

• Local authority and HSCP commissioners and contract managers (care homes, care at home, housing support, and funded early learning and childcare providers, which must meet the National Standard of grades of good or better)
• Care home groups, operators, investors and lenders watching their own estate or acquisition targets
• Insurers and brokers covering care providers
• Placement teams, care-finding and nursery-finder platforms that badge services as active or well graded

The recurring job: tell me when a service on my contract or portfolio list is cancelled, changes hands, drops below "good", or receives an enforcement or an upheld complaint, without re-downloading and diffing the Care Inspectorate files every month.

Billable events (PPE scotland-care-service-event-delivered @ $0.02):

Group	Event	Meaning
status	STATUS_CHANGED	Active ↔ Inactive / Cancelled (adverse=true unless the new status is Active)
provider	PROVIDER_CHANGED	Provider ID or provider name changed (change of ownership or rebrand)
grades	GRADE_CHANGED	Any key-question grade (1 Unsatisfactory to 6 Excellent) or the minimum grade changed: GRADE_DOWNGRADE / GRADE_UPGRADE / GRADE_REVISED
enforcement	ENFORCEMENT_ISSUED	Datastore count of enforcements issued rose for a financial year
complaints	COMPLAINT_UPHELD	Datastore count of upheld complaints rose for a financial year
directory	APPEARED / DROPPED	Service number appeared in, or disappeared from, the directory download
inspections (opt-in)	INSPECTION_RECORDED	Last inspection date changed
attributes (opt-in)	NAME_CHANGED	Service name changed

Non-billable: RUN_STATUS (FIXTURE_HEALTH, MONITOR_IDLE, CATCHUP_COMPLETE, HEALTH_OK), first-run baselines and duplicates. A quiet watchlist costs only the platform start fee.

This is not a dump of the directory billed per row. It does not read inspection report text. Manager names, emails and phone numbers are never included in the output.

First run vs later runs

Default sourceMode=fixture is a free health check: one non-billable RUN_STATUS row, not product data.

In live mode, run 1 stores a baseline for each service (no change events, no product charge). Run 2 onwards emits only the differences against that checkpoint. Keep using the same Task so the checkpoint carries over.

What you get per $0.02 event

Each event is one unique change for a named service. It includes the service name, type, status, provider, minimum grade, an adverse flag, before and after values (all key-question grades for a grade change), the effective date, the datastore month and the official source URL. You are never charged for RUN_STATUS, baselines, quiet MONITOR_IDLE runs, invalid numbers, duplicates or fixture SAMPLE rows.

Example output (SAMPLE)

SAMPLE: illustrative field shape only, not a real event.

{
  "cs_number": "SAMPLE01",
  "service_name": "EXAMPLE CARE HOME A (SAMPLE)",
  "event_type": "GRADE_CHANGED",
  "event_subtype": "GRADE_DOWNGRADE",
  "previous_value": "min 4 (Good)",
  "new_value": "min 2 (Weak)",
  "adverse": true,
  "datastore_as_of": "2026-08-31",
  "billable": false,
  "sample": true,
  "summary": "SAMPLE (fixture demo data with placeholder entities, not a real event)"
}

Input

• csNumbers: Care Inspectorate service numbers, for example CS2003000168 (the CS prefix is optional). Aliases: serviceNumbers, caseNumbers.
• sourceMode: fixture (free health check) or live (official Care Inspectorate open data)
• signalGroups: any of directory, status, provider, grades, enforcement, complaints, inspections, attributes (default: the first six)

Production use

{
  "csNumbers": ["CS2003000168", "CS2003000237", "CS2003001774"],
  "sourceMode": "live",
  "signalGroups": ["directory", "status", "provider", "grades", "enforcement", "complaints"]
}

Source and honesty notes

• Status and provider: the official care service directory CSV (careinspectorate.scot/care-services/directory/download), read at run time. On 2026-10-06 it held 40,616 unique CS numbers: 10,356 Active, 142 Inactive and 30,118 Cancelled.
• Grades, enforcements, complaints and last inspection: the monthly Care Services Open Datastore CSV. The newest month is found automatically from the datastore page. It covers about 10,500 active and inactive services and is usually published one to four weeks after month end, so these events lag the Care Inspectorate's own publication.
• If the datastore cannot be read in a run, status and provider monitoring still runs and the earlier grades are carried forward. The RUN_STATUS row records a warning when this happens.
• Durable key: CS number (CS followed by 10 digits).
• Licence and attribution: Care Inspectorate (Scotland) open data under the Open Government Licence v3.0. This Actor is not affiliated with or endorsed by the Care Inspectorate.

Pricing

Event	USD
scotland-care-service-event-delivered	$0.02
apify-actor-start	$0.00005

Limitations

• Check the service's page and latest inspection report on careinspectorate.scot before making contract, funding or placement decisions.
• Counts of enforcements and upheld complaints come from the datastore by financial year. The Actor reports increases; it does not include the enforcement or complaint text.
• Cancelled services normally stay in the directory with status Cancelled. DROPPED fires only if a number disappears from the download entirely.
• Covers Scotland only (England is regulated by CQC and Ofsted, Wales by CIW).