Dear Laurie Miles,
I just want to reinforce Jon's message. I was on the original RCGP/GMSC
Joint Computer Group in 1988 which selected the Read Codes as a national
standard and recommended that the Department of Health should purchase
them.
If you wish to have the ability to record all clinical information on
computer you must have a very rich thesaurus from which to select your
desired terms. These must have a coded heirarchical structure so that you
can subsequently extract and analyse your data. If in addition you wish
to communicate your recorded data to others in the NHS, you must
all use the SAME CODED SYSTEM. There is no practical alternative to Read.
The public relations have been very poorly handled and a totally false
impression of the Read system has been propagated. I believe this is now
being slowly corrected because it has done NHS IT a lot of harm. NHS IT is
essentially demand led. No funding will be found if clinicians don't
demand it and at the moment most clinicians (particularly outside primary
care) are turned off Read largely because they don't understand that they
need it. A classic Catch 22 situation!
*Clifford Kay*
Manchester UK
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