trud

library(trud)

The National Health Service (NHS) England Technology Reference data Update Distribution (TRUD) enables programmatic access to retrieve metadata for and download NHS TRUD release items. The trud package wraps this API, facilitating programmatic retrieval and updating of NHS TRUD resources:

Having installed trud, you will also need to:

TRUD_API_KEY=e963cc518cc41500e1a8940a93ffc3c0915e2983

Optional: You can customise the user agent header used in API requests by setting the TRUD_USER_AGENT environment variable. This can be useful for CI/CD environments or organisational tracking.

Understanding TRUD Subscriptions

Important: NHS TRUD operates on a subscription-based model. Having an API key allows you to authenticate, but you must also subscribe to individual items through the NHS TRUD website before you can access them.

The subscription workflow:

  1. Create your NHS TRUD account and get your API key (as described above)
  2. Browse available items on the NHS TRUD website
  3. Subscribe to the specific items you need
  4. Use the trud package to access your subscribed items

Examples

Check your current subscriptions

Start by seeing what items you’re already subscribed to:

get_subscribed_metadata()

Browse all available items

You can see all available TRUD items, though you’ll need to subscribe to access them:

trud_items()

Note that item numbers can also be found in the URLs of releases pages, between items and releases. For example, the URL for the Community Services Data Set pre-deadline extract XML Schema releases page is https://isd.digital.nhs.uk/trud/users/guest/filters/0/categories/1/items/394/releases and the item number is 394.

To subscribe to an item, visit its page on the NHS TRUD website and click the “Subscribe” button.

Get metadata for a specific item

Once subscribed to an item, you can retrieve its metadata:

get_item_metadata(394) |>
  # Display structure without showing sensitive API keys in URLs
  purrr::map_at("releases", \(release) purrr::map(release, names))

Download an item

# by default the latest release will be downloaded to the current working directory
x <- download_item(394, directory = tempdir())
unzip(x, list = TRUE)

Working with specific releases

To download a specific release (rather than the latest), you need the release ID. Release IDs are found in the id field of each release:

# Get metadata for all releases (not just latest)
metadata <- get_item_metadata(394, release_scope = "all")

# Release IDs are in the `id` field of each release
metadata$releases |> purrr::map("id")

# The same IDs are also used to name the releases list
metadata$releases |> names()

# Use a specific release ID with download_item()
release_id <- metadata$releases[[1]]$id  # Get ID of first release
download_item(394, directory = tempdir(), file_type = "checksum", release = release_id)

  1. You will also need to restart your R session to set any environmental variables that have been newly-added to your project .Renviron file.↩︎