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Care Quality Commission

The Care Quality Commission (CQC) is the independent regulator of health and adult social care in England, operating under the Health and Social Care Act 2008. The CQC registers, monitors, and inspects health and social care services—including hospitals, GP practices, dentists, ambulances, care homes, and home care services—to ensure they meet fundamental standards of quality and safety. The CQC API provides programmatic access to the CQC's comprehensive registry of regulated providers and locations across England, including inspection ratings, registration status, service types, and contact details. Organizations use the CQC API to build compliance monitoring dashboards, integrate care quality data into internal systems, support procurement decisions, and power research and analytics workflows.

Care Quality Commission icon

Power end-to-end data operations for your Care Quality Commission API with Nexla. Our bi-directional Care Quality Commission connector is purpose-built for Care Quality Commission, making it simple to ingest data, sync it across systems, and deliver it anywhere — all with no coding required. Nexla turns API-sourced data into ready-to-use, reusable data products and makes it easy to send data to Care Quality Commission or any other destination. With comprehensive monitoring, lineage tracking, and access controls, Nexla keeps your Care Quality Commission workflows fast, secure, and fully governed.

Features

Type: API

SourceDestination

  • Seamless API Integration: Connect to any endpoint as source or destination without coding, with automatic data product creation
  • Visual Composition & Chaining: Build complex integrations using visual templates, chain API calls, and compose workflows with data validation and filtering
  • API Proxy: Expose curated slices of your data securely with a secure and customizable API proxy that validates and transforms data on the fly
  • Request optimization with intelligent batching, retry, and caching to minimize API calls and costs

Prerequisites​

Before creating a Care Quality Commission API credential in Nexla, you must obtain a subscription key from the CQC Developer Portal. The CQC API uses subscription-key authentication—each request must include your subscription key, which the CQC uses to identify your integration and apply appropriate rate limits.

Register on the CQC Developer Portal​

To obtain a subscription key for the Care Quality Commission API:

  1. Navigate to the CQC Developer Portal at https://api-portal.service.cqc.org.uk/.

  2. Click Sign up in the top navigation to create a new account. You will need to provide your name, email address, and a password. Check your email for a confirmation message and follow the link to verify your account.

  3. After verifying your account, sign in to the CQC Developer Portal using your credentials.

  4. Once signed in, navigate to the Products section and select the API product you want to subscribe to (for example, CQC Syndication). Click Subscribe to request access to the API.

  5. After your subscription is approved, navigate to your Profile page by clicking on your name or account icon in the top navigation. Your subscription key will be listed under your active subscriptions.

  6. Copy the Primary Key from the subscriptions section. This is the subscription key you will use to authenticate API requests from Nexla.

The CQC Developer Portal uses Azure API Management (APIM) infrastructure. Subscription keys are listed on your profile page and consist of a primary key and a secondary key. Either key may be used for authentication. The secondary key is useful as a backup if the primary key is regenerated or compromised.

Important

Keep your subscription key secure. Treat it like a password—do not commit it to version control, share it publicly, or embed it in client-side code. If you believe your key has been compromised, you can regenerate it from the Profile page of the CQC Developer Portal.

CQC API Base URL​

The CQC API is accessible at the following base URL:

  • https://api.service.cqc.org.uk

All requests should be made over HTTPS. The API follows RESTful principles and returns data in JSON format.

The CQC previously operated a public API at https://api.cqc.org.uk/public/v1 that did not require authentication. This older endpoint has been migrated, and current access now requires authentication via the CQC Developer Portal. Ensure you are using the authenticated API base URL when configuring your Nexla credential.

For complete information about the CQC API, see the CQC Developer Portal API documentation.

Authenticate​

Create a credential in Nexla​

  1. After selecting the data source type, click the Add Credential tile to open the Add New Credential overlay.

  2. Enter a name for the credential in the Credential Name field and a short, meaningful description in the Credential Description field.

  3. Enter the base URL for the CQC API in the Base URL field. The default value is https://api.service.cqc.org.uk. This is the root URL that Nexla will use for all API calls to the CQC.

  4. Enter the subscription key obtained from the CQC Developer Portal in the Subscription Key field. This key authenticates all requests Nexla makes to the CQC API and identifies your integration to the CQC.

    Your subscription key is available on your Profile page at the CQC Developer Portal (https://api-portal.service.cqc.org.uk/profile). Both the primary and secondary keys are valid for authentication. It is recommended to use the primary key and reserve the secondary key as a backup.

  5. Click the Save button at the bottom of the overlay. The newly added credential will now appear in a tile on the Authenticate screen during data source creation.

Use as a data source​

To create a new data flow, navigate to the Integrate section, and click the New Data Flow button. Select the Care Quality Commission API connector tile, then select the credential that will be used to connect to the Care Quality Commission API instance, and click Next; or, create a new Care Quality Commission API credential for use in this flow.

Endpoint templates​

Nexla provides pre-built templates that can be used to rapidly configure data sources to ingest data from common Care Quality Commission API endpoints. Select the endpoint from which this source will fetch data from the Endpoint pulldown menu. Available endpoint templates are listed in the expandable boxes below.

Get Providers

This endpoint retrieves a list of registered care providers from the CQC registry. A provider is an organisation or individual that manages one or more regulated care services. Use this endpoint to access provider registration details, contact information, ownership type, and registration status for all active and inactive providers across England.

  • This endpoint automatically retrieves all providers accessible with your subscription. The CQC dataset is paginated, and Nexla will automatically handle pagination to retrieve the full provider list.
  • Each provider record includes fields such as provider ID, provider name, registration status, ownership type, primary category, phone number, website, and registered address.
  • You can use the retrieved provider IDs as inputs for more detailed provider lookups, including their associated locations and inspection reports.

The CQC registry contains both active and de-registered providers. Review the registrationStatus field in returned records to filter for currently active providers. For complete information about provider data fields, see the CQC Developer Portal API documentation.

Get Locations

This endpoint retrieves a list of regulated care locations from the CQC registry. A location is a specific site where a regulated service is delivered—such as a hospital ward, care home, GP surgery, or dental practice. Use this endpoint to access location-level data including inspection ratings, service types, address details, and registration status.

  • This endpoint retrieves all locations in the CQC registry, paginating automatically to return the complete dataset.
  • Each location record includes fields such as location ID, location name, CQC overall rating (Outstanding, Good, Requires Improvement, Inadequate), registration status, address, service types, and the associated provider ID.
  • Location records include the most recent CQC inspection rating for the site. The currentRatings object contains the overall rating and any key question ratings (Safe, Effective, Caring, Responsive, Well-led).

Location IDs and provider IDs in CQC data follow a specific format (e.g., 1-123456789). These IDs are stable identifiers that can be used to join location data with provider data or to look up detailed inspection reports. For complete information about location data fields and ratings, see the CQC Developer Portal API documentation.

Get Provider Details

This endpoint retrieves detailed information for a specific registered provider by provider ID. Use this endpoint when you need comprehensive data about a particular provider, including their full registration details, associated locations, inspection history, and contacts.

  • Enter the Provider ID in the Provider ID field. Provider IDs follow the CQC format (e.g., 1-123456789) and can be obtained in the following ways:

    • Using the Get Providers endpoint to retrieve a list of providers and their corresponding IDs.
    • Looking up a provider on the CQC website and copying the ID from the provider's detail page URL.
  • The response includes comprehensive provider-level data: registered address, contact details, registration status, ownership type, the list of regulated activities, associated location IDs, and last inspection date.

Detailed provider records contain a locationIds array that lists all regulated locations managed by the provider. You can use these IDs with the Get Location Details endpoint to retrieve inspection ratings and service information for each site.

Get Location Details

This endpoint retrieves detailed information for a specific regulated location by location ID. Use this endpoint when you need comprehensive data about a particular care site, including its current CQC inspection ratings across all key questions, regulated activities, service types, and specialist service designations.

  • Enter the Location ID in the Location ID field. Location IDs follow the CQC format (e.g., 1-123456789) and can be obtained in the following ways:

    • Using the Get Locations endpoint to retrieve a full list of locations and their IDs.
    • Using the Get Provider Details endpoint to find the locationIds array for a specific provider.
    • Looking up a location on the CQC website and copying the location ID from the URL.
  • The response includes the current overall rating, ratings for each CQC key question (Safe, Effective, Caring, Responsive, Well-led), type of service, regulated activities, nomination status, and the date of the most recent inspection.
  • The currentRatings object in the response contains both the current overall rating and any legacy report ratings, giving a complete picture of the location's inspection history.

CQC ratings use a four-point scale: Outstanding, Good, Requires Improvement, and Inadequate. A rating of null or absent indicates that the location has not yet been inspected or that a rating is not applicable for that key question. For complete information about the rating framework, see How CQC Regulates.

Get Changes

This endpoint retrieves a list of providers or locations that have been updated in the CQC registry within a specified date range. Use this endpoint to build incremental data pipelines that capture only new or changed records, reducing the volume of data processed on each run and keeping your systems up to date with the latest CQC data.

  • Enter the start date in the Start Timestamp field using the format YYYY-MM-DDTHH:MM:SSZ (e.g., 2024-01-01T00:00:00Z). This defines the beginning of the time window for which changes will be retrieved.
  • Optionally, enter an end date in the End Timestamp field using the same format. If left blank, the endpoint will return all changes from the start timestamp up to the current time.
  • Select whether to retrieve changes for providers or locations using the appropriate resource type parameter.
  • The response includes the IDs of all providers or locations that were added, updated, or de-registered within the specified period, along with the type of change.

The Get Changes endpoint is ideal for building scheduled incremental refresh pipelines. By using {now-1} as the start timestamp and {now} as the end timestamp in the API URL with Nexla's date/time macros, you can automatically capture each day's changes without reprocessing the entire CQC dataset. See Connect to Any API for guidance on using date/time macros in the API URL.

Once the selected endpoint template has been configured, click the Test button to the right of the endpoint selection menu to retrieve a sample of the data that will be fetched. Sample data will be displayed in the Endpoint Test Result panel on the right, allowing you to verify that the source is configured correctly before saving.

Manual configuration​

Care Quality Commission API data sources can also be manually configured to ingest data from any valid Care Quality Commission API endpoint, including endpoints not covered by the pre-built templates, chained API calls, or custom request parameters. Select the Advanced tab at the top of the configuration screen, and follow the instructions in Connect to Any API to configure the API method, endpoint URL, date/time and lookup macros, path to data, metadata, and request headers.

Common CQC API endpoint URL patterns include the providers list (https://api.service.cqc.org.uk/public/v1/providers), a single provider (.../public/v1/providers/{providerId}), the locations list (.../public/v1/locations), a single location (.../public/v1/locations/{locationId}), and changes (.../public/v1/changes/provider?startTimestamp=2024-01-01T00:00:00Z). Your subscription key is passed as a request header automatically by Nexla using the value stored in your credential—do not add it manually in Request Headers. List responses are wrapped in a top-level array (e.g., {"locations": [...], "total": 12345, "nextPageUri": "..."}), so set the path to data to $.locations[*] or $.providers[*] as appropriate; the total and pagination fields can be captured as metadata.

Once all of the relevant settings have been configured, click the Create button in the upper right corner of the screen to save and create the new Care Quality Commission API data source. Nexla will now begin ingesting data from the configured endpoint and will organize any data that it finds into one or more Nexsets.