Corporate Groupings in Care Provision – Finding the Data for GP Practices, Prequel…

For some time I’ve been pondering the best way of trying to map the growth in the corporate GP care provision – the number of GP practices owned by Virgin Care, Care UK and so on. Listings about GP practices from the various HSCIC datasets don’t appear to identify corporate owners, so the stop gap solution I’d identified was to scrape lists of practices from the various corporate websites and then try to reconcile them against GP practice codes from the HSCIC as some sort of check.

However, today I stumbled across a dataset released by the Care Quality Commission (CQC) that provides a “complete directory of places where CQC regulated care is provided in England” [CQC information and data]. Two data files are provided – a simple register of locations, and “a second file … which contains details of registered managers and care home bed numbers. It also allows you to easily filter by the regulated activities, service types or service user bands.”

Both files contain fields that allow you to identify GP practices, but the second one also provides information about the actual provider (parent company owner) and any brand name associated with the service. Useful…:-)

What this means is it should be easy enough to pull the data into a report that identifies the practices associated with a particular brand or corporate group… (I’ll have a go at that as soon as I get a chance…)

Another thing that could be useful to do would be to match (that is, link) the location identifiers used by the CQC with the practice codes used by the HSCIC. [First attempt here…. Looks like work needs to be done…:-(] Then we could easily start to aggregate and analyse quality stats, referring and prescribing behaviour data, and so on, for the different corporate groupings and look to see if we can spot any meaningful differences between them (for example, signals that there might be corporate group level policies or behaviours being applied). We could probably also start to link in drug trial data, at least for trials that are registered, and that we can associate with a particular practice (eg Sketching Sponsor Partners Running UK Clinical Trials).

Finally, it’d possibly also be useful to reconcile companies against company registrations on Companies House, and perhaps charity registrations with the Charities Commission (cf. this quick data conversation with the 360 Giving Grant Navigator data).

PS more possible linkage:
– company names to company IDs on OpenCorporates (and from that we can look for additional linkage around registered company addresses, common directors etc)
– payments from local gov and NHS to the companies (from open spending data/transactions data)
– food hygiene inspection ratings (eg for care homes)