Research and analysis

HPR volume 13 issue 36: news (11 October)

Updated 20 December 2019

Hospital norovirus reporting website relaunched

The National Infection Service’s Hospital Norovirus Reporting System (HNORS) website – which captures information on confirmed and suspected outbreaks of norovirus in England’s hospitals – was taken offline in May this year in order to implement security upgrades. This work is now complete and the website was relaunched on Monday 7 October 2019.

Infection control staff at NHS hospitals in England report data on suspected or confirmed outbreaks via the HNORS website and these data are used in the compilation of the PHE National Norovirus and Rotavirus report (NNRR). Besides recording outbreaks, HNORS is the only surveillance system to capture a broad range of impact measures of norovirus outbreaks in the NHS, enabling assessment and quantification of the disruption, impact and burden on hospital resources.

For national norovirus surveillance to be effective it is essential that all outbreaks of suspected or confirmed norovirus in NHS hospitals are reported to HNORS and NHS laboratories refer representative proportions of positive norovirus samples from these outbreaks to the national reference laboratory (Enteric Virus Unit, PHE Colindale) on a regular basis.

To ensure that ascertainment of outbreaks over recent months is consistent with the period prior to HNORS going offline, PHE has encouraged users to report, retrospectively, outbreaks which occurred during the offline period.

Updated guidance for those entering data to HNORS has been published [1]. Further initiatives are planned over the coming months including a user survey with the aim of improving outbreak ascertainment and the user experience, as well as encouraging the reporting of suspected and confirmed outbreaks of norovirus. With effect from 17 October, the frequency of publication of the NNRR changes from monthly to weekly [2].

Enquiries about HNORS can be emailed directly to the national Norovirus Surveillance Team at NoroOBK@phe.gov.uk.

References

1. GOV.UK (4 October 2019). Hospital Norovirus Outbreak Reporting System: user guidance.
2. GOV.UK. See, “Norovirus: guidance, data and analysis”, from 17 October 2019.

Infection reports in this issue

This issue includes:

• Routine reports of gastrointestinal infections in humans, England and Wales: August and September 2019.

• Suspected and laboratory confirmed reported norovirus outbreaks in hospitals (England) and norovirus laboratory reports (England and Wales): weeks 36 to 39, 2019.