IT Standards for NHS England. Documented in markdown and managed as code.
Out standards are built based on other standards and policies across the UK Government and Health sectors.
The UK Government Tech Vision - ‘Standards that meet user needs: we must be clear how these standards address the user needs of people who use health and care services, carers and families, as well as care professionals and commissioners.’
The NHS Long Term Plan - ‘Set standards that keep information secure and make sure NHS IT systems talk to each other to provide health and care staff with complete access to joined up patient records.’
Standards Catalogue - A catalogue of the standards in this repository.
Standards that are known to need to be added but time and resources have not yet caught up, they are documented in the TODO document.
If you would like to contribute to these standards, please raise an Issue in the first instance.
Contributions will be accepted via Pull Request (PR). Direct contributors should create a "topic branch" in this repository, make changes there and then submit a PR to get the changes approved and accepted into the master branch which will always be the "current" published version.
Non-direct contributors should create a fork of this repository, make changes and submit a PR.
Minor changes will be reviewed by the main owners of this repository. Major changes to standards will be reviewed initially by the NHS England joint Technical Design Authority. Detailed reviews and further discussions may then be allocated to subject matter experts as required.
All standards published in this repository will be written in GitHub Flavoured Markdown.
Folders, naming standards, reference numbers and other structural standards are yet to be agreed.
To add/amend standards in this repository, see the Contributing section above.
Devices being used to make amendments will need Git installed.
Standard development type tools can be used to manage the change process. Many people will have a favourite code editor that supports Markdown such as Microsoft Visual Studio Code (which is free for all use and available on different platforms). VS Code has a number of extensions that support management of GitHub repositories.
For anyone who wants something more visual than a text editor, Typora is recommended. Typora provides a visual editor (WYSIWYG) making edits much easier for non-coders.
Unless otherwise specified, all content in this repository and any copies are subject to Crown Copyright under the Open Government License v3.
Any code is dual licensed under the MIT license and the Open Government License v3.
Any new work added to this repository must conform to the conditions of these licenses. In particular this means that this project may not depend on GPL-licensed or AGPL-licensed libraries, as these would violate the terms of those libraries' licenses.
