A few years ago the Health Development Agency - HDA (now known as the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE)) created a Public Health Information Thesaurus which was originally based on the European Multilingual Thesaurus on Health Promotion. This thesaurus was used to index HealthPromis (the Health Promotion bibliographic catalogue), as well as the HDA's Evidence Base and the Public Health Electronic Library.
The Health Intelligence team at NICE has been working with the Public Health Observatories and the National Library for Health Team on issues related to interoperability and public health. Part of this work involved the development of a common public health language to describe information and resources that are held on our websites and databases with the aim of improving the searching for and retrieval of these resources.