Vocabulary for Substance

Version:	2.0
Status:	active
Date:	2004-04-05

A code representing a substance present in a medication. It may be an active ingredient, e.g. paracetamol, or an excipient, such as alcohol. It may be a combination of two substances, e.g. paracetamol and codeine in a co-codamol preparation.

Any code that describes an active chemical constituent of a pharmaceutical product, taken from one the following code systems:

SNOMED CT UK

A code from Snomed-CT (UK) may be accompanied by additional qualifying codes from the same coding system.

Clinical Terms (Read Codes) v3

A code from Clinical Terms (Read codes) Version 3 may be accompanied by additional qualifying codes from the same coding system.

EMIS Drug Codes

An optional code from another of the coding systems described above, representing a mapping to the first code, may be used as a "translation".

A translation code is not required if the data was originally recorded in Snomed-CT UK; otherwise the "translation" code should have an identical or more general meaning than the original code.