How I scraped the CQC Care Register without hitting the API auth wall
The article discusses how to scrape the CQC Care Register data without facing authentication issues. The author outlines the challenges encountered with the CQC's new API and the solution of using a publicly available open-data file. By parsing the data from this file, the author created a scraper that efficiently retrieves and processes the information needed.
- ▪The Care Quality Commission regulates over 56,000 healthcare and social care locations in England.
- ▪The CQC's new API requires bearer token authentication, creating barriers for data access.
- ▪The author utilized a monthly open-data file published by CQC to scrape the necessary information without authentication.
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Story provenance
Source · retrieval · rights · ranking — open for full record
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Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | DEV.to (Top) |
| Canonical URL | https://dev.to/danielainsworth/how-i-scraped-the-cqc-care-register-without-hitting-the-api-auth-wall-180p |
| Publication time | Thu, 28 May 2026 21:21:43 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-28T21:29:38.368Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-28T21:29:38.368Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | kJtchbXJd0M6 |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
try { if(localStorage) { let currentUser = localStorage.getItem('current_user'); if (currentUser) { currentUser = JSON.parse(currentUser); if (currentUser.id === 3954791) { document.getElementById('article-show-container').classList.add('current-user-is-article-author'); } } } } catch (e) { console.error(e); } Daniel Ainsworth Posted on May 28 How I scraped the CQC Care Register without hitting the API auth wall #javascript #typescript #node #webdev The Care Quality Commission regulates 56,000+ healthcare and social care locations in England — care homes, GP surgeries, hospitals, dental practices, home care agencies. If you work in care sector tech, you've probably needed this data at some point. There's a CQC REST API, and I was planning to wrap it. Then I hit the auth wall.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at DEV.to (Top).
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