Levels of ratings: GP practices

Page last updated: 17 April 2023
Categories
Organisations we regulate

We consider information about the quality of care provided when we look at the five key questions - safe, effective, caring, responsive and well-led.

For each GP practice that we inspect, we will rate at two levels:

Level 1: A rating for each key question for the location/service. This is based on relevant evidence of how GP practices personalise people’s care and provide care for different groups of people.

Level 2: An overall rating for the service. This is an aggregated rating informed by our findings at level 1.

The following example shows how the two levels work together.

  Safe Effective Caring Responsive Well-led Overall
Location/service Good Good Good Good Requires improvement Good

Sometimes, we won’t be able to award a rating. This could be because:

  • the service is new
  • we don’t have enough evidence
  • the service has recently been reconfigured, such as being taken over by a new provider

In these cases, we will use the term ‘inspected but not rated’.

We may also suspend a rating at any level. For example, we may have identified significant concerns which, after reviewing but before a full assessment, lead us to re-consider our previous rating. In this case, we would suspend our rating and then investigate the concerns.