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Welcome to the Public Health Language
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| A few years ago the Health Development Agency - HDA (now known as the National Institute for Health
and Clinical Excellence (NICE)) created a Public Health Information Thesaurus which was originally based
on the European Multilingual Thesaurus on Health Promotion. This thesaurus was used to index HealthPromis
(the Health Promotion bibliographic catalogue), as well as the HDA's Evidence Base and the
Public Health Electronic Library. |
| The Health Intelligence team at NICE has been working with the Public Health Observatories and the
National Library for Health Team on issues related to interoperability and public health.
Part of this work involved the development of a common public health language to describe information and
resources that are held on our websites and databases with the aim of improving the searching for and
retrieval of these resources.
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| The Health Development Agency and England's Public Health Observatories (PHO's) have developed a
unified Public Health Language (PHL) [formally known as the National Public Health Language] to facilitate
interoperability. The first version of this language was officially launched at a conference on the 20th
December 2004. The PHL is the result of integrating the former HDA's "Public Health Information Thesaurus"
with the PHOs "Public Health Information Tagging System" (PHITS), which are no longer active as they have been
superseded by the PHL.
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| The Public Health Language has been adopted by many organisations and can now be considered as 'the'
Public Health Language for the UK and Ireland.
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| The PHL Working Group project to create a Public Health sub-set of SNOMED CT
has been completed and is part of its April 2008 release as a test sub-set.
For information about this project, please contact Claire Bradford.
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