Top health concerns of the nation REVEALED… so can you guess what the top 10 are?
Top health concerns of the nation REVEALED… so can you guess what the top 10 are?
- The NHS published data on the most-visited web pages for medical conditions
- Covid came first, followed by long Covid, high blood pressure and chickenpox
- Half of the the conditions Britons were most concerned about affect children
The nation’s top health concerns have been revealed… and Covid is the condition sparking the most fear.
Millions of people turn to the NHS website every year to get medical advice for conditions ranging from vomiting to tonsillitis.
And the four ailments concerning Britons most are Covid, long Covid, high blood pressure and chickenpox.
The NHS published data on its most-visited web pages for medical advice. Half of the top 10 were for conditions which largely affect children.
The top health concerns of the nation have been revealed… and Covid is the condition sparking the most fear
The Covid web page was the most viewed by a huge margin, with 16.3million views.
Long Covid came in second with 4.3million views, trailing the pandemic-triggering virus by more than 10million searches.
High blood pressure was the third most viewed with 3.8million searches while chickenpox came in fourth with 3.7million.
Completing the top 10 most-searched conditions were ADHD (3.5million), fever in children (3.4million), scarlet fever (3million), diarrhoea and vomiting (2.9million), tonsillitis (2.8million) and rashes in babies and children (2.7million).
NHS Digital, who manage the NHS website, said visits to the chickenpox page more than doubled in 2022 with 3.7 million views compared with 1.7 million in 2021.
The provider also said there were three million visits to its scarlet fever information in 2022 – seven times the amount of clicks in 2021, when there were 414,000.
The end of last year saw an outbreak in the bacterial infection Strep A, which can lead to scarlet fever and has so far led to the deaths of 30 children in the UK.
It said that visits to the ADHD page ‘remained high’, increasing from 3.1 million in 2021 to 3.5 million in 2022.
COVID: The number of people infected with Covid taking up hospital beds in England fell 11 per cent from 9,414 in the week to January 4 to 8,404 in the seven days to January 11. NHS data shows the figure peaked at 9,533 on December 29 and has since fallen 19 per cent to 7,743
Searches for fever in children were also up last year, with 3.4 million visits compared with 2.9 million in 2021.
And diarrhoea and vomiting page visits increased by 500,000 from 2021 to 2022.
The NHS website had an estimated 2.6 million visits a day in 2022.
The most popular section of the website was the Covid-19 booking page – which had 60 million visits.
Other popular health services available on the website include an application form for a Global Health Insurance Card (GHIC) for healthcare cover abroad, finding a GP, and a BMI healthy weight calculator.
There were also 60 times as many visits to the page on monkeypox with 2.1million in 2022, compared to only 35,000 in 2021.
Joe Risk, NHS Digital’s head of delivery for the NHS website, said: ‘Millions of people used the NHS website in 2022 for the latest Covid information or to book a vaccination, as well as for advice on topics ranging from high blood pressure to diarrhoea and vomiting.
‘Providing access to the latest medical advice and making it as easy as possible for people to access is our top priority, to ensure we continue to support and improve health across the country.’