CQC's inspection programme of Defence Medical Services: Annual report for 2025/26 (Year 9)

Summary of inspection activity in 2025/26

This report sets out our findings about the quality of care in Defence Medical Services (DMS) from our inspections in 2025/26 – Year 9 of this programme. As in previous years, the Defence Medical Services Regulator (DMSR) identified the facilities to be inspected.

During the year, we carried out 29 comprehensive inspections, comprising:

• 11 medical centres (including 2 primary care rehabilitation facilities with expert input from DMS physiotherapy and exercise rehabilitation specialist advisers)
• 17 dental centres
• 1 Defence Mental Health Network.

We also carried out 19 follow-up inspections to ensure that services have resolved the concerns we found on initial inspections. We re-inspected:

• 15 medical centres (including primary care rehabilitation facilities with input from DMS physiotherapy and exercise rehabilitation specialist advisers)
• 3 dental centres
• 1 pre-hospital emergency care (PHEC) service.

Most services have been able to deliver improvements, although there are still barriers to improvement in some areas, specifically:

• insufficient leadership capacity
• lack of a clinical information system to provide a comprehensive set of performance indicators
• poor infrastructure
• gaps in mandatory training
• gaps in staffing and delays in recruitment
• operational pressure.

In our inspection reports, we continued to highlight notable practice to encourage other services to learn from it and to adapt what is relevant to use in their own improvement journey.

Along with DMSR, CQC is committed to ensuring that armed forces personnel and their families can access the same high-quality care as the rest of society. We commend military and civilian personnel for their continued hard work and commitment to delivering high-quality, safe and effective care.

All inspection reports for Defence Medical Services are published on our website.