NHS Organisations

django-nhs-organisations is a tiny app to help you store, use and update NHS Organisation data in your Django project.

The current version is tested for compatiblily with the following:

• Django versions 1.11 to 2.0
• Python version 3.6

Installation

1. Install the package using pip:

   pip install git+https://bitbucket.org/rkhleics/nhs-organisations.git

2. Add nhsorganisations to INSTALLED_APPS in your project settings:

   INSTALLED_APPS = [
       ...
       'nhsorganisations',
   ] 

3. Run migrations:

   python manage.py migrate nhsorganisations

4. Populate data by pulling from the NHSI website:

   python manage.py pull_organisations_from_nhsi_site

Keeping your local data up-to-date

Currently, the NHS Improvement Corporate Website is the closest thing we have to a 'source of truth', and the only place we know of that serves the data in a way that can be easily consumed by other apps (as JSON, at the URL: https://improvement.nhs.uk/organisations.json)

So, to update your local data to reflect the source of truth, run the following command:

python manage.py pull_organisations_from_nhsi_site

Could this break things in my project?

Organisations are only ever 'closed', and so should never be removed from the data source once they have been created. Unless you're doing something really bizarre in your app, you shouldn't ever have to worry about unexpected data loss or knock-on effects of running this command; It will always be atomic and non-destructive.

How regularly should I update?

For production environments, it's recommended you set up a recurring task to call the above command once every 24 hours (some time between 1am and 4am, ideally).