Archive for month: January, 2023

Coronavirus, chickenpox and scarlet fever were among the most commonly viewed conditions on the NHS website in 2022.

A 2022 Top Ten list compiled by NHS Digital shows the most popular pages related to Coronavirus, with 16.3 million visits to advice on COVID-19 symptoms, testing and self-care, followed by 4.3 million clicks on long Covid.

High blood pressure was the third most-visited condition, attracting 3.8 million views, while scarlet fever, chickenpox and monkeypox all saw big increases in visits, compared with 2021.

Visits to the chickenpox page more than doubled in 2022 to become the fourth most visited condition, with 3.7 million against 1.7 million in 2021.

Scarlet fever was the seventh most visited page, with 3 million visits in 2022 – seven times the amount of clicks in 2021, when there were 414,000.

There were also 60 times as many visits to the page on monkeypox with 2.1 million in 2022, compared to only 35,000 in 2021.

Visits to the attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) page remained high, increasing from 3.1 million in 2021 to 3.5 million in 2022, making it the fifth most visited condition of the year.

Searches for fever in children were also up in 2022, with 3.4 million visits compared with 2.9 million in 2021, and diarrhoea and vomiting page visits increased from 2.4 million in 2021 to 2.9 million in 2022.

Tonsillitis received 2.8 million hits in 2022 from 2.1 million in 2021, and rashes in babies and children increased to 2.7 million in 2022 from 2.4 million the previous year.

The ten most viewed pages about medical conditions in 2022 were:

1. Coronavirus (16.3 million)
2. Long Covid (4.3 million)
3. High blood pressure (3.8 million)
4. Chickenpox  (3.7 million)
5. Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) (3.5 million)
6. Fever in children (3.4 million)
7. Scarlet fever (3 million)
8. Diarrhoea and vomiting (2.9 million)
9. Tonsillitis (2.8 million)
10. Rashes in babies and children (2.7 million)

Joe Risk, NHS Digital’s head of delivery for the NHS website, said:

“Millions of people used the NHS website in 2022 for the latest Covid information or to book a vaccination, as well as for advice on topics ranging from high blood pressure to diarrhoea and vomiting.

“Providing access to the latest medical advice and making it as easy as possible for people to access is our top priority, to ensure we continue to support and improve health across the country.”

The NHS website, which is managed by NHS Digital, is the UK's biggest health website with an estimated 2.6 million visits a day in 2022 from people seeking information and advice. It includes over 4,000 pages and provides information about 990 medical conditions.

The most popular page on the NHS website in 2022 was the COVID-19 vaccination booking page, with 60 million visits.

Other health services available on the website include applying for a free UK Global Health Insurance Card for healthcare cover abroad, finding a GP, and a BMI healthy weight calculator.

Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) is the global interoperability standard. To help us ensure a standard way of handling interactions between different systems, and to improve interoperability, we invite you to participate in Sprint 6 of the Clinical and Technical Assurance process, in which we will review the resources used to support diagnostics of use cases.  

Find out more and register by emailing interoperabilityteam@nhs.net.

Join us for the next Spine Futures webinar on 23 February from 3.30pm to 4.30pm. This event is open to anyone working in health and care who wants to hear about our plans for the Spine of the future and tell us their needs for our national services.

The webinar will will focus on the latest product developments from the programme including how we are working with social care software providers on discharge events, the latest National Record Locator (NRL) developments including integration with bookings and referrals (BARS). It will also provide information on how Message Exchange for Social Care and Health (MESH) migrated to cloud without impacting the service.

Spine Futures provides a secure, adaptable, and sustainable infrastructure for the health and care system in England. It enables data integration between critical healthcare systems. This allows national digital services to be built upon to meet the current and future needs of staff, patients, and citizens.

Through the programme, we aim to remove barriers to access and innovation, save time and money for colleagues working in health and care and provide continuity of Spine services while enhancing the digital capability of the NHS.

Find out more and book your place.

The next revision of the International Classifications of Diseases (ICD), ICD-11, is now approved by the WHO and will be mandated for use in the future. Our assumption is that ICD-11 will not be mandated for use across the NHS in England before April 2026, but to prepare for the changes, we are currently running an ICD-11 pre-implementation project to create a high-level implementation plan, which we aim to have ready in April 2023.  

Find out more about our preparations for implementing ICD-11, as well as useful resources such as e-learning modules, ICD-11 API and coding tools, use cases and more. New content is being added continuously and we will also be scheduling interactive sessions with stakeholder groups over the coming months.  

We are tweaking our approach to this bulletin in response to feedback. Instead of relying on a quarterly bulletin, which has sometimes meant information has arrived too late and buried in a long email, we have set up this section on our website for essential information for technology suppliers.   

When essential items are added to the website, we will email you an alert. You will receive a short summary of these alerts every quarter instead of the bulletin.  

If you have any feedback, please contact bulletins.nhsdigital@nhs.net.