Private / independent hospitals (CQC)
Published by Care Quality Commission · Official source
Update schedule
- Monthly directory file for the overall rating; the domain, service-level and report-link detail is polled weekly from the CQC Syndication API and changes as inspections publish — the same feed used for NHS hospital pages.
Level of detail
- Independent hospital (CQC location)
What we show
- Latest overall rating: Outstanding, Good, Requires improvement, or Inadequate
- The five key-question ratings (safe, effective, caring, responsive, well-led), from the CQC Syndication API
- Rating publication date and last inspection date
- A link to the location's full CQC report and inspection history on cqc.org.uk
- Per-service ratings (e.g. surgery, outpatients, termination of pregnancy) for locations CQC rates by service rather than with one overall
- Location address, contact details, provider (group) name and inspection category
- For the minority of independent hospitals that also carry out NHS-funded work (matched to their own NHS provider ODS code), we additionally show that hospital's NHS-funded referral-to-treatment (RTT) waiting times and hip/knee replacement patient-reported outcomes (PROMs), sourced from NHS England (england.nhs.uk / digital.nhs.uk) — the same statistics shown on NHS hospital pages, but scoped to just this hospital's own NHS-funded activity
- NHS-funded RTT: waiting-list size, % waiting within 18 weeks, median wait, and patients waiting over 52 weeks, by specialty and month
- NHS-funded PROMs: hip & knee replacement average health gain (Oxford Score / EQ-5D, case-mix-adjusted) and patient counts, for the latest finalised year
Caveats
- Independent (private-sector) hospitals are regulated by the Care Quality Commission and shown in their own section, separately from NHS hospitals — the CQC rates both sectors on the same five inspection questions, but they operate on different bases (funding, activity mix, patient population) and are NEVER ranked or compared against NHS hospitals anywhere on this site.
- A CQC rating is the regulator's own judgement of a location at the time of inspection, not a comparative score or a review — it is shown with no league table, badge tier, or numeric ranking, exactly as on NHS hospital pages.
- We show CQC regulatory data, plus — where NHS England separately publishes it — that hospital's own NHS-funded RTT/PROMs activity (see below). Private-pay activity volumes, fees, waiting times and outcomes for independent providers are held by the Private Healthcare Information Network (PHIN) under closed, non-open-licence terms and are NOT shown here or anywhere on this site.
- The NHS-funded RTT and PROMs figures cover NHS-FUNDED ACTIVITY ONLY at that hospital. Most independent hospitals do a much larger private-pay (self-pay/insured) caseload alongside any NHS-funded work — that private-pay activity and its outcomes are not published under an open licence and are never shown, so the NHS-funded figures must never be read as representing the hospital's overall waiting times or outcomes.
- Only around 129 of the roughly 924 published independent hospitals have a matching NHS provider ODS code and therefore this NHS-funded layer; where a hospital has none, no RTT/PROMs section is shown for it — never inferred or estimated.
- This NHS-funded layer is matched by the hospital's own NHS ODS ('Organisation') code, taken from the CQC register — the same RTT/PROMs extracts used for NHS trust pages, filtered to that code instead of an NHS trust code, and kept in separate, isolated tables that are never fed back into NHS trust rankings, search or the sitemap.
- Only independent hospitals that currently hold a CQC rating are published; a location CQC has not yet rated does not have a page on this site.
- England only — CQC regulates independent healthcare in England. Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland regulate independent hospitals separately (Healthcare Improvement Scotland, Healthcare Inspectorate Wales, RQIA), which are out of scope here.
- Some locations are not yet rated ('Not yet rated') and are excluded; some are rated only per-service (no single location-wide overall) — the same nuance as the NHS CQC methodology page.
Reused under the Open Government Licence v3.0. Contains public sector information.