Where our data comes from

Choosing home care is a decision people make once, often in a hurry, usually for someone they love. You should be able to see where every fact on this site came from.

The register

All 18,066 services listed here come from the Care Quality Commission’s monthly directory of registered services, published as open data under the Open Government Licence v3.0. We refresh it monthly. Every profile links back to the live CQC record so you can check the current position yourself.

What the register tells you

• The registered name of the service and the provider behind it
• Its address and the local authority it sits in
• What kind of service it is registered as, and which needs it is registered to support
• The date of its most recent CQC check

What it does not tell you

Registration is permission to operate, not a recommendation. It says a service met the bar to be registered and is subject to inspection. It says nothing about whether the carers turn up on time, whether the office answers the phone, or whether your mother will like them.

The directory file also carries no rating. Read the current CQC inspection report before you decide anything, and ask the service for references.

Coverage

England and Scotland. Care is regulated separately in each nation, so this is two registers, not one: the Care Quality Commission for England and the Care Inspectorate for Scotland. Wales and Northern Ireland have their own (Care Inspectorate Wales and RQIA) and we do not list those yet. We would rather say that plainly than claim UK coverage we do not have.

The two registers do not hold the same things

This matters when you compare a Scottish service with an English one, so it is worth being blunt about it.

The Care Inspectorate grades every service it registers from 1 to 6 and publishes the range, so a Scottish listing here carries the regulator’s own grade. The CQC directory file carries no rating at all, so an English listing does not. An English service showing no grade has not been marked down; it is not graded this way.

It runs the other way too. The CQC records the specialisms a service is registered for, which is what the condition filters are built from. The Scottish file records every one of these services as “Adults” and nothing more, so Scottish listings have no specialisms until a provider tells us. Again, that is a gap in the record, not in the service.

The Scottish register also carries an email address and a manager’s name for almost every service. Those are individual people’s contact details, published so families can get in touch, and we do not republish them. The email is used for one thing: checking that somebody claiming a service actually works there.

Corrections

If a registration detail is wrong here it is almost certainly wrong on the register, so correcting it with the CQC fixes it here at the next refresh. For anything else, tell us and we will put it right.

BestHomeCarers is independent and not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to the Care Quality Commission.