How we explain reports

A CQC inspection report is a public document, published under the Open Government Licence, and it is the best evidence a family has about a care service. It is also long, formal and written for the provider. We read every one and explain it. This page says exactly how, and where the limits are.

Where the data comes from

The list of services, their ratings and their reports come from the Care Quality Commission’s published data and its public API. We refresh the register monthly and check each service’s rating, its five key-question ratings, its rating history and its list of reports on a rolling basis. When the CQC publishes a new report, we fetch its text and explain it.

How the explanation is written

The explanation is written by an AI language model that is given the full text of one report and nothing else: no knowledge of the provider, the area, reviews or news. It is asked to write for a son or daughter who has never read a CQC report, in plain British English, and to draw only on what the report says.

Each explanation has the same parts: a one-line headline, a short account of what the inspectors did and found, what it means for a family choosing this service, a line on each of the five key questions, the strengths and concerns the inspectors raised, any breaches of regulation or enforcement action, and questions worth asking the service.

How we check it

Every strength and every concern must carry a sentence quoted from the report. After the explanation is written, we search the report text for each quote. If a quote is not in the report, word for word, that point is deleted before anything is published. That rule is mechanical and it has no exceptions: a claim we cannot anchor to the inspectors’ own words does not appear.

The remaining prose is a paraphrase, and paraphrase can lose nuance. That is why every page links to the full report on cqc.org.uk beside our explanation, and why we say on each page which report it was written from and when.

What we do not do

• We do not name individual people, whether staff, residents, relatives or inspectors, even where the report does.
• We do not add opinion. If a report is silent on something, so are we.
• We do not rank services, and we do not take money from any provider to alter what is shown about them.
• We do not explain reports we cannot fetch in full. Where a report is listed but not explained, the page says so and links to the CQC.

What you should still check

• The date. A rating can be years old. The page shows when it was published and the ratings before it.
• The full report, for anything you are about to act on. It is one click away on every page.
• The service itself. Visit, or for home care ask to meet the carers who would come, and ask the questions our explanation suggests.

Corrections

If you run a service and believe an explanation misrepresents the report, or if you are a family member who has spotted something wrong, write to hello@cqcexplained.co.uk with the page address. We will check it against the report and correct or withdraw it.

This site is run by Helper.Community Ltd, trading as PrimeCarers, which introduces families to self-employed carers. That is why every page ends with the option of a private carer. It has no bearing on what we say about any service; the method above is the same for all of them. More about who we are.