A new database from the San Francisco Chronicle is pulling back the curtain on hospital safety problems across California, giving Bay Area patients a clearer look at where things have gone wrong inside local medical facilities.
The searchable tool compiles state inspection narratives and deficiency reports into a single interface, highlighting specific sentences that may describe patient harm. For families trying to decide where to seek care, it offers a rare, document-by-document view of what regulators say they found inside hospitals, clinics, and nursing homes.
Reporters gathered the records in November 2025 from the California Department of Public Health’s Cal Health Find site. They assembled inspection reports dated from January 2022 through November 2025, according to the San Francisco Chronicle. The dataset includes roughly 40,000 deficiency reports. After excluding facilities with no public reports, there were about 10,000 facilities in the tool, and approximately 4,000 of those had at least one regulatory violation. The Chronicle then grouped facilities by type and bed size, calculating violations per bed so users can see whether a particular facility racks up more or fewer citations than its similar peers…