ODS - correctly-cased organisation names on JSON and FHIR APIs
Currently the name of an organisation that is returned from either ODS API is in all-caps. It would be a lot nice for display purposes if the names were in a less-shouty case. Maybe there could be a FormattedName property, or maybe the Name property could just not be all-caps - I personally don't really mind either way.
For example, RBA11 is given the name "TAUNTON AND SOMERSET NHS FOUNDATION TRUST", but for display would be something more like "Taunton and Somerset NHS Foundation Trust".
Comments: 5
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10 Aug, '23
Marcin CalkaWith the current ALL CAPS naming pattern it is very difficult to format these names back to original, especially when we are trying to display acronyms right eg: NHS, CCG, ICS... etc. I am also curious what is the accessibility impact with ALL CAPS being used/displayed in websites using ODS API.
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18 Aug, '23
Chris Wilcox (ODS Project Manager)Hello,
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The issue of title case has been raised previously, and there is a ticket on our Jira board that is tracking this request.
We will update the ticket to include your use case, and currently we believe this could be addressed as part of the uplift to our internal authoring tool.
The effort will be assessed as part of the overall requirement and balanced against the need for the change.
This activity is yet to start, and so no further information can be provided at this point in time. -
04 Nov, '23
Tom SmithThere is open-source R code available to help with this, written by a member of the NHS-R community.
The code can intelligently convert ALL CAPS NHS trust names to a variety of other options.
Docs: https://polc1410.gitlab.io/nhsnames/index.html
Code: https://gitlab.com/polc1410/nhsnames
NHS-R Community: https://nhsrcommunity.com/ -
06 Nov, '23
Tony Heap Admin@Tom - thanks for making us aware of this. We're keen to promote open source and we've updated our API documentation to mention this work:
• https://digital.nhs.uk/developer/api-catalogue/organisation-data-service-fhir#overview--open-source
• https://digital.nhs.uk/developer/api-catalogue/organisation-data-service-ord#open-source
• https://digital.nhs.uk/developer/guides-and-documentation/reference-guide#open-source -
12 Apr, '24
Richard WardI'm all for OSS, but I do hope that the correct casing will still come to the API (or a future version - I heard rumblings of an entirely new orgs API, but that was months back). An automated conversion is probably plenty accurate for most cases, but "most cases" is not "all cases", and even if it is a perfect conversion not everyone will be able to use such a tool.
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