Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, further to her answer to written parliamentary question 19983, which department or body holds the patient data recorded using the four categories of severity for myalgic encephalomyelitis/ chronic fatigue syndrome that the SNOMED CT codes recognise, namely (a) mild (SCTID: 377181000000104), (b) moderate (SCTID: 377171000000101), (c) severe (SCTID: 377161000000108) and (d) very severe (SCTID: 2897971000000106).

SNOMED CT codes are used by general practices (GPs) to record patient diagnoses on their medical records. This is a different system to the International Classification of Diseases 10th Revision codes that are used in hospital admissions data.

The NHS England Terminology and Classifications service manages the SNOMED CT codes that GPs use, but this service would not hold any statistics on the use of these codes. Further information on the service is available at the following link:

https://digital.nhs.uk/services/terminology-and-classifications/snomed-ct

To be recorded centrally at NHS England, patient data would first need be extracted from GP clinical systems as part of a data collection. We are not aware of any NHS England data extractions that target these specific SNOMED codes.