We have a group of lovely birthing groups and parenting groups that use some of our building regularly, and I get to chat to them - women who are pregnant and women who have young babies.
They are *in a bad way*.
In one of the expectant mothers groups, two of the nine had to stop work early due to complications in their pregnancies.
I sometimes hear things like that and wonder to myself if it is actually something that is becoming more common, or whether it's my imagination.
😮I want to smash something.
I've just stumbled across the official NHS coding guidance for U07.3 - 'Personal history of Covid-19' - and it left me on the floor.
🚨When paired with the data on the number of times it is currently used, it is a huge unknown national scandal.
The ICD-10 codes are the codes that are entered into NHS hospitals activity databases.
So when someone gets healthcare, it's for a reason, so they look up the code for that reason, and put the code into the database.
They're supposed to put this code, U07.3, into the databases when a past diagnosis of Covid (confirmed or probable) "influences the person's health status".
There's absolutely zero doubt in my mind that things have changed.
But *how*?
I've been sharing a lot of these graphs over the last month, but each chart looks at the *small* picture.
I have a big picture brain.
So here's a thread about the *big* picture.
You can see in this image charts with loads of different *shapes*.
They all chart the same time span.
They're all from the same geographical area and age range.
They all chart the same type of data - 'hospital episodes'.
That last bit is important.
These are *hospital episodes*.
That's the number of episodes of *hospital treatment or consultation*.