NHS Choices

Your health, your choices

NHS Choices is the UK’s biggest health website. It provides a comprehensive health information service to help put you in control of your healthcare.

The website helps you make choices about your health, from decisions about your lifestyle, such as smoking, drinking and exercise, to finding and using NHS services in England.

NHS Choices includes more than 20,000 regularly updated articles. There are also hundreds of thousands of entries in more than 50 directories that you can use to find, choose and compare health services in England.

Health A-Z
This section explains more than 840 conditions and treatments in words, pictures and videos. Top doctors and health professionals share their knowledge and advice while patients give an insight into coping with conditions and the treatments they have had.

You can also check symptoms for a wide range of conditions and get advice on the next steps.

In addition, the medicines guide provides comprehensive information about prescription and over-the-counter medicines, including known possible side effects, interactions and dosages.

The online clinic service enables you to get quick answers to your personal medical questions from specialists, including consultants, GPs, nurses and other clinicians.
Guides
NHS Choices carries a range of ‘guides’ that pull together a mass of easily understood information on big topics. These include the Pregnancy and baby guide, the Moodzone, which covers stress, anxiety and depression, the Dementia guide, the Contraception guide, and the Vaccinations guide.
Common health questions
Get quick answers to hundreds of common health questions on subjects such as dental health, food and diet, pregnancy, blood pressure, sexual health, exercise and much more.
Services near you
This section has comprehensive directories of NHS services in England. More than 300 national directories give details of everything from hospitals, GPs and dentists to care services, gyms, addiction support and services for specific conditions. All you have to do is select the type of service you are looking for and enter a postcode, location or organisation name. For some NHS services you can also see how well your local area is performing against national standards.
Patient feedback and comments
Rate and comment on NHS services, including hospitals, GPs, dentists and mental health trusts. You can give your views about the care that you, a friend or family member received.
Patient feedback helps you make informed decisions about health services and encourages healthcare providers to assess their services and make changes where necessary. We alert service providers when a comment has been left on their profile and they are given the opportunity to reply.
Comments
You can comment on most articles on the site. Unlike patient feedback, which only requires that you provide an email address, you will need to set up an NHS Choices account to comment on articles. If you don’t want to leave a comment, you can rate the content, from unhelpful to very helpful, using the star-rating facility. This helps us see what content is useful and what needs to be improved.
Live Well
This is the healthy living section of the site, where you can find information and advice for people of all ages on staying healthy. There are more than 100 topics on everything from anger management to workplace health.
Browse Live Well and get tips on losing weight, getting fit, stopping smoking, healthy eating and much more.
The NHS in England
Get a wealth of information about the health service in England, including its history and how it’s organised and regulated. Learn about your choices in the NHS, the different NHS services available in England and how to access them, how to get help with health costs and how to ensure you’re covered for healthcare abroad.

Other features in this section include the ability to compare your local Clinical Commissioning Groups by their performance so you can see how the standard of services in your area measures up against that elsewhere.
We also publish consultant performance data for a range of treatments so you can check whether your hospital consultant is performing well.

This area of the site also carries regularly updated information on NHS consultations and investigations, such as the Keogh Review that looked into higher-than-expected death rates at 14 hospital trusts.
You can also have your say about the future of the NHS. Read about the future plans and join the discussion in the I love NHS forum.
Online Transactions
NHS Choices offers direct links to enable you to carry out a range of transactions, such as ordering a free European Health Insurance Card (EHIC), buying a Prescription Prepayment Certificate, or booking hospital appointments through the Choose and Book service. Additionally, many GPs and pharmacies listed on the site subscribe to the Electronic Prescription Service and a growing number of GPs and dentists have systems to let you book appointments online.
Care and Support
Care and support is your essential guide to social care. It offers an introduction to social care and information about financial help. It also offers a vast amount of information and practical tips for carers.

Behind the Headlines

Behind the Headlines provides a guide to the science that makes the news, often dismissing some of the top stories

Examples include:

Warnings issued over energy drinks

“Energy drinks could cause public health problems, says WHO study,” The Guardian reports. A new review discusses the potential harms of these drinks, especially when they are mixed with alcohol…”

Cannabis labelled ‘harmful and as addictive as heroin’

“Cannabis: the terrible truth,” is today’s Daily Mail front page splash story. The paper cites the risks posed by cannabis – including a doubling of the risk of schizophrenia…”

Minimum alcohol pricing would ‘save 100s of lives’

“Hundreds of lives lost’ over failure to bring in minimum alcohol pricing,” The Independent reports. The news is based on research that modelled the effect of a minimum alcohol price per unit of around 40 to 50 pence…”

Students showing signs of phone addiction

“Students spend up to 10 hours a day on their mobile phones,” the Mail Online reports. The results of a US study suggest that some young people have developed an addiction to their phone…”