What actually drives re-inspection — provider type, cadence and geography — from the full inspection history.
No geographic ‘next-door’ pattern
Consecutive inspections
9 km apart
Random pairs
9.32 km apart
Inspections that happen one-after-another in a local authority are essentially as far apart as random pairs (9 km vs 9.32 km median, 77,708 pairs sampled) — CQC does not sweep areas or inspect neighbour-then-neighbour.
Re-inspection cadence
Median re-inspection interval
12.7 months
Mean interval
15.8 months
Across 129,477 intervals for all services. Published re-inspections have largely stalled since 2023.
Your base probability
0.03%
chance a given all home is the next one inspected in Kent (3183 of that type).
A nearby home being inspected does not change this — there's no geographic ‘next-door’ pattern.
Local care-workforce vacancy rate: 6.5% (Skills for Care 2024/25).
Inspected on average 2.01× over their lifetime.
Local workforce strain vs quality
Does area staffing shortage predict worse ratings?
No. Across 131 local authorities, an area's care-workforce vacancy rate shows essentially no correlation with its share of poorly-rated homes (r = -0.015).
Vacancy quartile
Avg vacancy
Avg poorly-rated
LAs
Lowest
4.4%
18.3%
33
2nd
6.1%
18.2%
33
3rd
7.4%
17.3%
33
Highest
10%
17.7%
32
Counter to the common assumption that understaffed areas have worse care — at local-authority aggregate level the two are unrelated. Workforce data: Skills for Care Adult Social Care Workforce Estimates 2024/25.
Based on full inspection histories reconstructed from CQC report records; distances are great-circle between locations' coordinates within the same local authority.