Free benchmark · UK private healthcare
What patients complain aboutin clinics like yours
We took 19,515 one- and two-star Google reviews of UK private clinics and private hospitals, collected in September and October 2026, and tagged what each one complains about. Pick your specialty or your region to see which topics come up more often than they do across the UK.
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How this worksWhere the reviews come from, how we tagged them, and what we mark as different.
The reviews
We collected 12,497 one- and two-star Google reviews of 1,748 UK private clinics, and 7,018 of 299 private hospitals, in late September and early October 2026. We left out dental practices, GPs, NHS services and single-practitioner listings.
How we tagged the topics
An AI model (Claude) read each review and tagged the topics it complains about, from a fixed list of 17. One review can raise several topics, so the shares add up to more than 100%. We ran the tagging twice on 500 reviews and the two runs overlapped on 92% of their topic tags; a second model overlapped on 86%. Nobody read every review.
What the percentages mean
Each percentage is the share of negative reviews that raise the topic. We also counted every business once, whatever its size, so one clinic with hundreds of reviews cannot drag the figure. Where that count lands 3 points or more from the headline figure, the topic's detail shows both.
When a difference counts
Any group of reviews drifts from the UK figure by chance, and reviews of one business are not independent: ten clinics with 500 reviews between them behave more like ten observations than 500. So each result carries a margin of error measured on the group's businesses. We draw the group's businesses at random with replacement, as many as it has, 400 times, recompute every topic's share each time, and record the largest change across the 17 topics. The 90th percentile of those changes is the margin you see, for example ±2.8 points for London's 5,521 clinic reviews from 604 clinics and ±10 points for Wales's 252 reviews from 35. We do this twice, counting every review once and counting every business once, and we mark a topic as different only when its gap is larger than the margin on both counts, because one or two businesses with many reviews can carry a gap on their own. Because the margin comes from the largest change across all 17 topics, it already allows for testing 17 topics at once. It does not allow for testing every group at once: at a 90% band about one group in ten carries a mark by chance, so a single mark on a small group is a lead. It is a bootstrap (the resampling above) with a 90% interval, not a formal hypothesis test.
Why 500 reviews
The margin depends on how many businesses are in the group and how their reviews spread across them, as well as the review count, so two groups of the same size can differ: 548 reviews from 78 clinics gives about ±7 points, 108 reviews from 13 clinics gives ±19. Below roughly 500 reviews or 10 businesses the margin is wider than most of the gaps we found, so a region or specialty gets a full result at 500 or more negative reviews from 10 or more businesses. Between 100 and 499 we still show the result, with its own margin, and mark only the gaps that clear it; with fewer than about 20 businesses, read those marks as leads. Under 100 reviews we show the order of topics and mark nothing.
What patients wrote
Under each topic you can read three fragments from reviews in the study: at most twelve words each, copied word for word, with no business, reviewer or place named. A script checked every fragment for names, and a person read every one before it went up. We show the same three for every region and specialty, to show what the topic means, so they are not a sample of any one group.
Specialties and regions
Specialty results are UK-wide, because no specialty has enough reviews to split by region. A business listed under several specialties counts in each. We place each business in one of the UK's twelve statistical regions by its address. We name no business and no reviewer.
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