Pain

(asked on 11th March 2019) - View Source

Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what assessment he has made of the potential merits of implementing a READ code for chronic pain.


Answered by
Steve Brine Portrait
Steve Brine
This question was answered on 19th March 2019

Read Codes, a coded thesaurus of clinical terms, have been used in the National Health Service since 1985. However, they were confirmed for retirement in 2014 and updates to the system are no longer being provided.

SNOMED CT (Systematized Nomenclature of Medicine - Clinical Terms) is the clinical terminology that has replaced Read Codes within the NHS. It is a structured clinical vocabulary for use in an electronic health record and is the standard for communication of clinical information between providers of care. SNOMED CT is an approved information standard published under section 250 of the Health and Social Care Act 2012.

Within SNOMED CT, there are currently 87 concepts, which represent a unique clinical meaning, related to the recording of chronic pain, including chronic back pain, chronic neck pain and chronic pain control. These can be viewed using the NHS SNOMED CT browser at the following link:


https://termbrowser.nhs.uk

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