Page last updated: 25-MAR-2008

General Practice - Practice Team Information (PTI)

Grouping of codes for conditions (RCGs)

Read codes
Read codes (version 2, Scottish) are the recommended national standard coding system in general practice for recording clinical information (signs, symptoms, diagnoses or activities). More information on Read codes can be found on the Connecting for Health website . Clinicians participating in PTI are asked to code the clinical information as specifically as possible. The number of codes that can be entered per consultation is unlimited, but generally no more than a handful of codes will be entered. Nurses are asked to code an activity and an underlying morbidity (the reason for the activity being carried out), whereas GPs are not typically expected to enter an activity. Clinicians only record conditions that are being actively managed within an episode of care. Conditions that a patient has, but which are not the reason for the contact, are not recorded as part of that particular contact.  For example, a patient with diabetes who consults because of backache and a cold will have codes recorded for these conditions but not for diabetes.

Read code Groupings (RCGs)
PTI data containing the full range of Read codes can be analysed by combining Read codes for a particular condition into one umbrella grouping. These groupings have the benefit of permitting practitioners to record morbidity using the full richness of Read codes (there are over 80,000 individual codes available), while at the same time facilitating analysis using common, or standard, groupings of morbidity definitions.

In conjunction with the review of the PTI dataset completed in March 2007, ISD have carried out a complete review of the grouping used for Read codes (previously called Standard Morbidity Groupings (SMGs)). The groupings are broadly based on the chapters of the International Classification of Diseases (10th revision, ICD-10; ICD-10 is another commonly used coding system, used for example in coding hospital, mortality and cancer registration data in Scotland and elsewhere in the UK & Europe).  The new groupings are called Read code Groupings (RCGs) and have been revised to specifically address the following issues:

  • Refinement of morbidity groupings to remove non-specific symptoms that do not necessarily define the condition.
  • Division of the previous single 'symptoms and signs' category into smaller, more meaningful categories such as respiratory symptoms or psychological symptoms.
  • Grouping of activities not previously available.
  • Generally, use of categories which directly relate to ICD-10 chapters or parts of chapters.

Although it is now possible to produce PTI analyses based exclusively on Read codes that map to ICD-10 chapters, this would ignore a large quantity of codes covering a host of symptoms, signs, activities and relatively vague (preliminary) diagnoses. Practices continue to record activity codes (such as asthma review) that are likely to indicate a diagnosis (such as asthma) without specifying the condition. While this might not strictly be the correct way to record a clinical diagnosis, excluding such activity codes will result in a misleading exclusion of these consultations, so routine analysis of PTI data includes these codes in the definition of the condition. The full list of Read code groupings is provided here in Excel format  link to a microsoft excel file  (45KB).

These revisions to Read code groupings have resulted in some changes to previously published figures (released prior to 27th March 2007). The Read code groupings have undergone limited subsequent revision for estimates published on 25th March 2008. Further detail on the changes is available in the Note of revisions .