Non-specialist acute hospitals

The CQC classifies hospitals as either non-specialist or specialist. As well as rating organisations for their overall quality, the CQC rates specific core services.

Non-specialist hospitals typically provide a range of services such as orthopaedics, general surgery, ophthalmology with some providing medical care. These are often what people picture when thinking about a typical hospital.

455 independent non-specialist hospitals run by 220 provider groups have been rated by the CQC, compared to 287 NHS non-specialist hospitals run by 122 NHS Trusts. Of these, 418 independent sites (92%) have good or outstanding overall ratings, compared to 135 NHS hospitals (47%). [1]

Looking at CQC ratings of non-specialist acute hospitals since 2018 when the CQC published its analysis of the state of care in independent acute hospitals, we see a notable improvement trend among independent providers as shown below:

This shows how the proportion of independent providers with either inadequate or requires improvement overall ratings has decreased from around 30% at the beginning of 2018 to 8% now. Conversely, the proportion of locations with good or outstanding ratings has increased from 70% to 91%.

Over that time the number of independent sector acute non-specialist hospitals rated by the CQC has more than doubled from just over 200 to 455.

Although many NHS trusts provide treatment to privately funded patients through their Private Patient Units, these units are not usually rated by the CQC.

[1] NHS Trusts are typically rated at provider-level as well as at hospital level, whereas independent providers are usually only rated at hospital (location) level. For this reason, we have used location-level comparisons for context in this report. Where we have done this, we have checked that provider-level ratings for NHS organisations are broadly in line with the location-level figures referenced in this report. For example, the percentage of provider-level good or outstanding ratings for NHS acute non-specialist hospitals is 45%.