Every NHS general practice in England is inspected by the Care Quality Commission and given an overall rating and, separately, a rating for each of six groups of patients. CQC publishes both, but shows them one practice at a time. This page holds the 5,234 rated practices together, so the overall rating can be read against what sits underneath it.

97% rated Good or Outstanding

5,078 of 5,234 rated NHS GP practices in England (97%) hold a Good or Outstanding overall CQC rating, and 156 are rated Requires improvement or Inadequate. CQC also rates every practice separately for six groups of patients, and those ratings do not always match the overall one.

  • 172 practices are Good overall while at least one population group underneath is rated below Good, visible only when the population-group ratings are read together
  • Working-age people is the population group rated below Good most often (115 of 3,087 practices whose population ratings come from their current assessment)

Overall ratings

Overall rating Practices Share of rated
Outstanding 263 5%
Good 4,815 92%
Requires improvement 146 2.8%
Inadequate 10 0.2%

14 of the 5,248 NHS general practices in the CQC directory have no published overall rating and are excluded from the shares above rather than counted as unrated.

Ratings by population group

CQC rates each practice separately for six groups of patients. A practice can be Good overall and still be rated below Good for one of them, which is what the last column counts. Counted here are only practices whose population ratings were published in the same assessment as their overall rating. CQC stopped issuing population-group ratings when it moved to its single assessment framework, so many practices carry population verdicts several years older than the overall rating beside them, and those two cannot be read as one picture.

Population group Practices rated Rated below Good Share
Working-age people 3,087 115 3.7%
Families, children and young people 3,086 84 2.7%
People with long-term conditions 3,085 75 2.4%
People experiencing poor mental health 3,085 48 1.6%
People whose circumstances may make them vulnerable 3,086 27 0.9%
Older people 3,085 24 0.8%

Good overall, weaker underneath

These practices are rated Good overall while the same CQC assessment rated at least one population group below Good. The overall rating is not wrong: it is an average, and this is what it averages over. Practices whose population ratings come from an earlier assessment are excluded, so nothing here pairs a current rating with a stale one. Showing the first 12 of 172 alphabetically.

Practice Where Group rated below Good
Addington Road Surgery West Wickham, London Families, children and young people
Adelaide Medical Centre London Working-age people
All Saints Surgery Burton-on-trent, West Midlands Families, children and young people
Amaanah Medical Practice Birmingham, West Midlands Working-age people
Anerley Surgery London Working-age people
Ashurst Primary Care Skelmersdale, North West Working-age people
Banbury Road Medical Centre Oxford, South East People experiencing poor mental health
Bath Row Medical Practice, Attwood Green Health Centre Birmingham, West Midlands Working-age people
Beaumont Leys Health Centre Leicester, East Midlands Working-age people
Belgravia Surgery London Families, children and young people
Bexley Medical Group Bexleyheath, London People experiencing poor mental health
Birdhurst Medical Practice South Croydon, London Families, children and young people

By region

Region Practices rated Rated below Good Share
London 940 38 4%
North West 828 18 2.2%
South East 705 13 1.8%
West Midlands 627 21 3.3%
Yorkshire & Humberside 509 10 2%
East 475 30 6.3%
South West 464 9 1.9%
East Midlands 420 12 2.9%
North East 266 5 1.9%

Regions are the CQC directory's own region field. CQC regulates England only, so Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland are not covered, because those nations have separate regulators.

How to read these ratings

A CQC rating describes an assessment published on a particular date, not the practice as it stands today. The assessments behind this page were published between May 2015 and July 2026, so some are several years old. A practice rated years ago may have changed in either direction since.

The rating is also about the practice as an organisation (safety, effectiveness, leadership and responsiveness), not about any individual GP, and not a measure of how long you will wait for an appointment. For a practice's full report, follow its CQC link.

Source: Care Quality Commission Care directory with ratings: location-level and population-group ratings for NHS general practice · 2026 NHS general practice is identified by CQC's own General Practice core service and population-group ratings, which private consulting doctors and clinics in the same directory do not carry.

PlainNHS is rendered directly from NHS England and Care Quality Commission public releases, no number is typed in by an editor. Every figure is a SQL aggregate over CQC's published care directory with ratings, computed at request time, with no editor-typed figures. See our editorial standards & corrections policy, the methodology behind these numbers, or report a data error on this page. Data current as of July 2026. Figures here are for context and comparison; clinical pathway decisions belong with your GP, NHS 111, or the treating Trust.