How we publish inspection information: primary medical services

Every time we inspect a health or social care service, we publish information about it on our website, normally within 50 days of the inspection.

This includes:

• details of recent inspections
• the inspection report
• current ratings

We also send email alerts to people who have registered an interest in a service, location or area.

Current and recent inspections

When we are inspecting a service, we display a message on its profile webpage. We remove this when we publish the inspection report.

The inspection report

We publish your inspection reports on the appropriate profile webpages. The ratings and summaries appear on the webpage, and the report and evidence table are available as PDF documents.

Email alerts

Visitors to our website can sign up for email alerts about our inspections related to particular locations.

Anybody who has signed up to receive alerts about your practice will get an email:

• when we have inspected the practice, and
• when we publish the report

We send these alerts once a week.

Enforcement action

We only publish information about enforcement action once any representations and appeals processes are complete.

The exception to this is urgent enforcement action, where we update our website with information straightaway. This includes action such as:

• suspending a provider or registered manager
• placing conditions on a provider’s registration because of major concerns.

Read more about our enforcement action and representations

Informing the media

We routinely send summary information about our findings to local, national and trade media.

We will normally send more in-depth details to the media when we:

• publish inspection reports with an overall rating of outstanding or inadequate
• take enforcement action
• prosecute