/nhs/medicines

POST /api/nhs/medicines

Price: 5 credits

Get an NHS medicine guide by its page identifier: title (including common brand names), a short summary, the meta description, the full set of article sections (what it is for, how and when to take it, side effects, who can and cannot take it, taking it with other medicines, pregnancy and more — each with its heading and text), and the dates the guide was published and last updated.

How to use it

Look up one NHS medicine by its page identifier (e.g. 'paracetamol-for-adults', accepts a full nhs.uk medicines URL). Returns one item with title, alias, summary, description, sections (section_id, title, text), published_at and updated_at. To find a medicine identifier, use nhs/medicines/search.

Parameters

• access-token string required

Request body

• timeout integer — Max scrapping execution timeout (in seconds) (default: 300; min: 20; max: 1500)
• slug string required — Medicine page identifier (examples: "paracetamol-for-adults", "ibuprofen-for-children"; minLength: 1)

Response

• @type string (default: "NhsMedicine")
• alias string required
• summary string nullable
• description string nullable
• sections array (default: [])
  • @type string (default: "NhsMedicineSection")
  • section_id string required
  • text string required
• published_at string nullable
• updated_at string nullable
• url string required

Errors

• 422 — The request body did not validate Check the fields against this schema. A URN with the wrong prefix is the most common cause.
• 408 — The request ran past its time limit Raise `timeout` in the request body, up to the maximum this endpoint documents. Lowering `count` or turning off the `with_*` flags also helps, because less work finishes sooner.
• 412 — No medicine found for the given identifier Retrying will not help: either the entity does not exist, or the input points at a different one.
• 429 — Too many requests: a rate limit or a usage window is exhausted When the response carries an X-Retry-After header, wait that many seconds and retry: the same number is in the body as `detail.retry_after`, and the limit clears once that window passes. The message in the body names the limit that was hit.
• 500 — Something broke on our side Retrying will not help. If it keeps happening, send us the X-Request-ID from the response headers.
• 529 — Rate limit reached, or the endpoint is overloaded Wait at least 30 seconds, then retry.

Response headers

• X-Error — Error message text (present only on error)
• X-Request-ID — Unique request identifier
• X-Execution-Time — Execution time in seconds
• X-Result-Count — How many records the body carries. 0 means an empty result, which is a normal answer and not by itself an error. A non-zero count can come back together with X-Error when the failure happened partway through — read this header and X-Error independently.
• X-Total-Available-Results — How many records exist for this query, when the endpoint can say. On a `dry_run` request this is the answer and the body is empty. It saturates: the endpoint's documented maximum means 'at least that many', any smaller number is exact.
• X-Warning — Present when the request body carried keys this endpoint does not document. They were ignored, so any filter you meant to apply through them did not apply. Check the spelling against this schema and retry.
• X-Retry-After — Seconds to wait before retrying. Present only on 429.