Searching
Search looks through every page of the board papers, coroners’ reports and local Healthwatch reports we hold. Anyone can search, signed in or not, and it’s the same on every plan.
Search for a word or phrase
Type a word and we find it and its plural. Put words in quotation marks to find them together, in that order, and only in that form. Outside quotation marks, we leave out symbols on their own, such as & or /, and drop the ’s from a word like children’s, so it finds child and children too. A & E and A and E mean A&E, and 12hr, 12 hrs and twelve hour all mean 12-hour.
Example
corridor finds corridor and corridors. "corridor care" finds only pages with those two words side by side. health & safety finds pages with both words, and coroner's report also finds coroners’ reports.
Combine words with AND, OR and NOT
Words you type next to each other must all be on the page. Use OR for either word, and NOT to leave a word out. Write the operators in capitals: a lower-case “and” is searched as an ordinary word. A minus sign doesn’t leave a word out, so use NOT. If you type corridor -ambulance or locum or agency, we offer the search written with NOT or OR. Brackets group words.
Example
locum OR agency finds either word. corridor NOT ambulance finds pages that mention corridors but not ambulances. (locum OR agency) "nurse staffing" needs nurse staffing and one of the other two words.
Words that start the same
Put * at the end of a word to find every word that starts with those letters. Use at least 4 letters before the *, and * on up to 4 words in one search. A plural is found anyway, so use * for other endings, like -ing or -ed.
Example
discharg* finds discharge, discharged, discharges and discharging.
Terms that mean the same
NHS papers use many names for the same thing, so we also search for common alternatives and tell you when we have. We also search the UK spelling of a US one, such as anaesthetic for anesthetic, and the joined or hyphenated form of a word, such as long-term for longterm. Choose “Search only for what you typed” to turn this off. Quotation marks and * turn it off for that word.
Some short forms mean more than one thing, such as ED (emergency department or eating disorder) or PA. We search those as you typed them. Put ~ in front to include what they can stand for.
Example
ICB also finds “integrated care board”. ~ED finds ED, emergency department, A&E, accident and emergency, and eating disorder.
Search one organisation’s papers
Type an organisation’s name, even if you aren’t sure of the spelling, or a common abbreviation such as NCL ICB, SNEE or GOSH, and we offer the organisations it looks like. Choose “Search its papers” to search only that organisation, with its name taken out of your search, or go to its page to see which of its papers we hold. You can also choose an organisation under Organisation in the filters.
Example
Type a trust’s name, or most of it, followed by corridor. We offer that trust, and “Search its papers for corridor” searches only its papers for corridor.
Narrow your results
Use the filters beside the results:
- Type of document: minutes, board packs (the papers sent to a board before its meeting), Healthwatch reports, or coroners’ reports.
- Nation: England, Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland, or UK-wide or more than one nation (coroners’ reports cover England and Wales together).
- Who published it: trusts, health boards, integrated care boards (the NHS bodies that plan and pay for local services in an area of England), integration joint boards (which plan health and social care for a council area in Scotland), regulators and other kinds of organisation.
- Which meeting: the board, committees, the council of governors, or scrutiny and other committees.
- Organisation and Meeting date, from and to.
Documents with no date are included unless you untick “Include documents with no date”. They come after dated ones.
Example
Search "freedom to speak up", choose Wales and Committees, and set the dates from January 2025 to see what Welsh committees discussed in that time.
Best match or newest first
A search of two or more words comes in best match order: the pages that match your words most closely come first. A search of one word, or filters alone, comes newest first. Choose the other order above the results, and we keep it for your next searches until you change it. Best match ranks the newest 40,000 matching pages, so for very common words add a date range or more words.
Example
waiting list matches a great many pages. Add cancer and a date range, and the best matches come first. Choose Newest first to see what was said most recently.
Mentions over time
Choose “Show mentions over time” for a chart of how many documents we hold that mention your search, by month, quarter or year. You can split it by nation, type of organisation, or board papers and coroners’ reports. You can also show it per 100 documents we hold, and see it as a table or download the counts.
These are documents we hold. Totals rise as we collect more papers, so a rise can reflect our collection rather than what organisations discussed. The chart doesn’t show what organisations did.
Example
Chart "corridor care" per 100 documents we hold, by nation. Showing it per 100 corrects for the papers we hold growing over time. It’s still a count of mentions in our collection.
Keyboard shortcuts
On the search page, press / to go to the search box from anywhere except a text field. Press Escape in the search box to clear it. Escape also closes Search tips, Copy reference, and the filters on a phone.
If / gets in the way, for example with speech control, turn it off here. We remember this in your browser.
Example
Read through the results, press /, and type your next search.
If search says no or too many
Each search can be up to 32 words. If a search is too broad to finish, we say so: add a date range or more words. If a search finds nothing, check Coverage to see whether we hold that organisation’s papers. Finding nothing doesn’t mean nothing was said.
Example
A search for one trust that finds nothing, where that trust is Partial, may simply have missed meetings whose papers we don’t hold yet.