Published: June 2022

Dear colleague,

On 1 April 2023 the OPCS-4 Classification of Interventions and Procedures – Tenth Revision (OPCS-4.10) will be implemented across the NHS. 

To support the NHS and NHS system suppliers with this implementation, the Terminology and Classifications Delivery Service of NHS Digital is undertaking necessary development work which will culminate in the release of OPCS-4 data files, the publication of updated OPCS-4 books and Classifications browser, associated clinical coding standards and training materials.

We have produced a draft summary of the changes between OPCS-4.9 and OPCS-4.10 and invite feedback on these changes from all users of the classification. The summary of changes is available for comment on Delen.

Following consultation and subject to approval by the Data Alliance Partnership Board (DAPB) the OPCS-4.10 Information Standard Notice will be published in September 2022 in readiness for NHS implementation on 1 April 2023.

Further information about the OPCS-4 classification and provisional dates for release of OPCS-4.10 products can be found on the OPCS-4 page on Delen.

The consultation is open until 29 July 2022.

Kind regards

Terminology and Classifications Delivery Service

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Published: June 2022

Dear colleague,

Please note that due to the integration of the new SNOMED CT International release and additional requirements to support the Monkeypox outbreak there has been a delay to the production of the 34.0.0 SNOMED CT UK Edition.

This will delay the release of the:

• SNOMED CT International Edition
• SNOMED CT UK Clinical Extension (including the SNOMED CT to ICD-10 and OPCS-4.9 maps)
• SNOMED CT UK Drug Extension
• SNOMED CT UK Pathology Extension

The 34.0.0 SNOMED CT UK Edition will now be published on Friday 22 July 2022, instead of its planned release date of Wednesday 13 July 2022.

NHS Digital is sorry for any inconvenience that this will cause you.

Kind regards

Terminology and Classifications Delivery Service

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As part of our ICD-11 preparations, we have created a short questionnaire for Technology Suppliers across England and Wales^*.

The questionnaire runs from June 15th to July 8th and should take only 5 minutes to complete. Responses will be analysed by members of the UK Classifications Technical Advisory Committee (UKCTAC) which includes staff from NHS Digital, Digital Health and Care Wales, Public Health Scotland and Digital Health and care Northern Ireland.

We will use your responses to help us develop communications materials, organise engagement events and start to assess the impact of the move from ICD-10 to ICD-11 on the supplier community.

The questionnaire also provides an opportunity for you to ask us any questions you have regarding ICD-11 and we will use these to develop a set of FAQs that will be published on the ICD-11 pages of this Delen website (for the NHS in England) and equivalent locations for the other UK countries.

We hope you can take a few minutes to complete the questionnaire and contribute to our early preparations for ICD-11.

^{Thank you.}

^{*Separate questionnaires are being organised by colleagues in Public Health Scotland and Digital Health and Care Northern Ireland for their respective clinical coding communities.}

Published: June 2022

Dear Colleague,

On Friday 10th June 2022 at 8:00pm (BST), Kahootz are performing an essential update on our service and it will be temporarily unavailable. We expect the update to take approximately 2 hours to complete, but we'll do everything we can to minimise the downtime.

Kind Regards

Terminology and Classifications Delivery Service

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As part of our ICD-11 preparations, we have created a short questionnaire for clinical coding staff across England and Wales^*.

The questionnaire runs from June 6th to July 4th and should take only 5 minutes to complete. Responses will be analysed by members of the UK Classifications Technical Advisory Committee (UKCTAC) which includes staff from NHS Digital, Digital Health and Care Wales, Public Health Scotland and Digital Health and care Northern Ireland.

We will use your responses to help us develop communications materials, organise engagement events and start to assess the impact of the move from ICD-10 to ICD-11 on the clinical coding community.

The questionnaire also provides an opportunity for you to ask us any questions you have regarding ICD-11 and we will use these to develop a set of FAQs that will be published on the ICD-11 pages of this Delen website (for the NHS in England) and equivalent locations for the other UK countries.

We hope you can take a few minutes to complete the questionnaire and contribute to our early preparations for ICD-11.

^{Thank you.}

^{*Separate questionnaires are being organised by colleagues in Public Health Scotland and Digital Health and Care Northern Ireland for their respective clinical coding communities.}

 

 

 

Terminology and Classifications Delivery Service Newsletter

Welcome to the May Newsletter. In this issue we feature:

• OPCS-4.10 Consultation
• Updated ICD-10 and OPCS-4 National Clinical Coding Standards
• OPCS-4 Capacity
• ICD-11 Pre-Implementation Project
• Clinical Terminology Service
• Changes to SNOMED CT Release Capabilities
• Release of tool to support analysis of medicine data sets
• Global Trade Item Numbers (GTINs) and ingredient strength now available in the NHS Digital Terminology Server

 

OPCS-4.10 Consultation

Development work to create OPCS-4.10 is underway. The consultation on the Summary of Changes between OPCS-4.9 and OPCS-4.10 is scheduled to run throughout July as an online survey.

This consultation, inviting feedback on the changes, will be published on Delen and we will confirm the dates of this consultation period in a separate message.

Please visit the OPCS-4 page for the high-level release roadmap and indicative dates of key development milestones.

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Updated ICD-10 and OPCS-4 National Clinical Coding Standards

The ICD-10 and OPCS-4.9 National Clinical Coding Standards reference books have been updated to incorporate some minor corrections of the original release; see the summary of changes section for details on the changes. The reference books can be accessed in the Resource Library.

The updated reference books will be available in the Classifications Browser and new eVersion packs will be available to download from TRUD shortly.

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OPCS-4 Capacity

NHS Digital is developing the next update to OPCS-4 (OPCS-4.10) for NHS implementation on 1 April 2023 as part of the three yearly release cycle.

The classification has significant capacity constraints, so a revision is required to address this issue and ensure the classification can continue to accommodate developments in clinical practice. NHS Digital has begun early planning and intends to conduct a more extensive user engagement exercise to ensure that this evolution addresses the medium-term needs of the health and care system in the UK. 

The long-term future direction will be reconsidered as interoperability across the NHS increases and will reflect further engagement with international standards providers around the identification of a potential international replacement. It is expected that, in the longer term, there will be a need to move to a new procedure classification that can better take advantage of a context when clinical records are comprehensively and consistently populated with SNOMED CT coded data. Consideration of the strategic replacement will include consultation with the NHS.

The scope for the revision work is restricted to the medium-term revision to OPCS-4. We will publish further details on the expected plan and user engagement as this evolves.

In the meantime, our immediate priority is to deliver the OPCS-4.10 update.

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ICD-11 Pre-Implementation Project

We have recently initiated a project that will help us prepare for the implementation of ICD-11. The ICD-11 Pre-Implementation Project, will run until March 2023 and will focus on engagement with stakeholders and the development of an ICD-11 Implementation Plan.

Over the coming weeks, information about the project and planned engagement activities will be published on our ICD-11 pages and updates will be provided throughout the year.

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Clinical Terminology Service

Last year we expressed an intention to build greater resilience, by stabilising our release processes (after significant process changes during the pandemic) and  enhancing and growing our team. As a consequence of various recruitment exercises, we are close to achieving our pre-pandemic capacities and we will continue to work to develop our skills and capabilities over the coming months.

In the near future, the Clinical Authoring team will contact all requestors of outstanding SNOMED CT submissions on the Request Submission Portal (RSP) to discuss continued needs and priorities.

The Clinical Authoring team has increased its capability to review and prioritise requests to update, maintain and start to develop new reference sets. The "SNOMED CT UK Edition: Governance and Change Request Process” guidance, which can be found at the SNOMED CT section of the RSP, is being updated to reflect this change.

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Changes to SNOMED CT Release Capabilities

All SNOMED CT releases to date during 2022 have been produced by the NHS Digital new release build engine.

This work is part of our commitment to continual service improvements. As well as reducing overall build time to just over two hours, the new platform is now routinely producing the SNOMED CT UK Clinical “Monolith” Edition. This is an integrated, fully merged snapshot release of the SNOMED CT UK Clinical Extension, UK Drug Extension, UK Pathology Extension and the International Edition, in one ‘more-ready-to-deploy’ bundle.

The new build platform will also make it technically possible in the future to provide more frequent UK SNOMED Clinical Extension releases. For example, we could consider mirroring the long-established schedule for new releases of the UK Drug Extension.

A four-weekly release schedule would allow us to track the monthly releases of the base SNOMED International content very closely. This would mean UK SNOMED users would benefit from having new content released to them as a continual drip feed from all sources.

Consultation on the future SNOMED CT UK Clinical Edition release schedule will be published in October 2022.

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Release of tool to support analysis of medicine data sets

NHS Digital has released a Medicines Text Mining Tool (MTMT) to make it easier to compare medicine data collections from different hospitals in England. The tool maps a hospital medicine description to the closest match in the NHS Dictionary of Medicines and Devices (dm+d) so that medicine data are comparable and in a standardised format. The mapped outputs can only be used for the secondary uses of data and must not be used for direct care (e.g. must not be used to map a hospital drug dictionary for direct care use).

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Global Trade Numbers (GTINs) and ingredient strength now available in the NHS Digital Terminology Server

Data from dm+d is available in the NHS Digital Terminology Server and now includes GTINs, (the numbers represented as barcodes) and information about ingredient strength for multi-ingredient products.

The Terminology Server’s web API enables users to query the most up-to-date data from the dictionary (and seven weeks of historical data). The Terminology Server provides an alternative way to access the dm+d data, while the XML files continue to be available to download from TRUD. 

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Have your say

If you would like more information about any aspect of our products or services, please let us know. Just write to us at information.standards@nhs.net, quoting “T+CD Newsletter” in the Subject field and providing details of what you would like us to cover.

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Published: May 2022

The NCCQ(UK) Syllabus, Framework, Bibliography 2022-23 has been reissued on the NCCQ(UK) page to correct the links to the Healthcare Resource Groups and The science of Casemix resources where the previous website has been moved.

The additional resource reference to ICD-10 & OPCS-4 Exercise and Answer Books has also been corrected to version 16.

Kind regards

Terminology & Classifications Delivery Service

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Published: May 2022

The OPCS-4 National Clinical Coding Standard PCSX27: Delivery of chemotherapy for neoplasm (X72-X73) states that:

The collection of codes classifying procurement is not required, therefore codes from categories X70 and X71 should not be assigned.

Note that this statement does not prevent the use of procurement codes where trusts wish to do so for local purposes.

This will be clarified in an updated release of the OPCS-4 National Clinical Coding Standards reference book which will be published shortly.

Kind regards

Terminology & Classifications Delivery Service

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Published: May 2022

Dear colleague,

We have made some updates to the content on our ICD-11 Delen page, including a short note about an ICD-11 pre-implementation project that we have just started. More details about the project and opportunities for engagement will follow in the coming weeks.

Kind regards

Terminology & Classifications Delivery Service

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Published: May 2022

To help students revise, and to assist managers and trainers to support their trainees, we have published this advance information about changes to the NCCQ (UK) Paper 2 – Theory Exam.

The changes will:

• improve the exam structure
• ensure the exam content is better aligned to the objectives of the syllabus
• ensure that candidates are fully demonstrating the knowledge and skills encompassed by the syllabus, that are valued by employers and are required for onward career progression.

These changes will be effective from 1st April 2022 and be formally introduced in the September 2022 NCCQ (UK) examinations.

There are no changes to Paper 1 – Practical Exam.

Please see the IHRIM Website and the NCCQ(UK) Paper 2 - Theory Technical Changes 2022 document for more information.