Data notification for the CP-IS system

The CP-IS shares information about children subject to a Child Protection Plan (CPP), pregnant women with an Unborn Child Protection Plan (UCPP) and children who are designated a Looked After Child (LAC) in particular children being cared for under the following sections of the Children’s Act 1989:

• Full Care Order (Section 31)
• Interim Care Order (Section 38)
• Voluntary Care Agreement (Section 20) 

Access to this information will now be made more available to schedule and unscheduled mental health, unscheduled sexual health, emergency dental healthcare and community paediatric professionals.

This will be carried out in 4 trusts as a pilot. These pilot sites are West London NHS trust, a specialist mental health trust who will be implementing CP-IS for the first time, along with Sheffield, Walsall and Guy’s and St Thomas that are all foundation trusts that are already have CP-IS.

This request to extend access has been made by the National Head of Safeguarding, NHS England and NHS Improvement for the purposes of enabling services who have a legal obligation for the safeguarding and promotion of the welfare of children, to deal with the increased risks to vulnerable children as a result of the pandemic.

NHS England have identified a risk that mental, sexual, dental and paediatric healthcare professionals will not receive information about vulnerable children whilst social distancing and social isolation is in place. 

Therefore, NHS England has requested that under the Directions, NHS Digital makes the CP-IS system available to mental, sexual and dental healthcare professionals and community paediatrics (the recipient) via the Summary Care Record application. 

The benefits of this data sharing are that it: 

• provides mental, sexual, dental and community paediatric healthcare professionals with a reliable source of information on the identity of vulnerable children when they present for unscheduled or scheduled care
• supports maintaining contact with vulnerable children and young people to help reduce the risk of poor health outcomes, abuse, injuries and in extreme circumstances avoidable death whilst quarantined in their homes or subject to significant social restrictions during the coronavirus response
• will enable early intervention – informing healthcare professionals so they can take action to prevent or reduce future harm happening to children
• allow improved safety and care – ensuing the information is at hand at the point of care and when children need help
• increase workforce efficiency and effectiveness – reducing the manual activities and filling any gaps in contextual information about a protected child

System delivery function and collection of audit data 

NHS Digital currently provides a service to Local Authorities that allows them to make information about vulnerable children (CP-IS flag) available to health professionals via the Child Protection - Information Sharing (CP-IS) system. This is made available for safeguarding and welfare purposes. 

The CP-IS system collects health audit data when healthcare professionals access the record. This information is shared with the flag in CP-IS with the recipients and is sent back to the local authorities to inform them of where a child has presented. This health audit data details the previous unscheduled presentations of the child in healthcare (up to 25 presentations).  

The CP-IS flag and health audit data is currently shared between: 

• local authorities
• emergency departments 
• minor injury units 
• walk-in centres 
• GP out-of-hours services/111 
• unscheduled access to maternity units 
• unscheduled access to paediatric wards 
• ambulance services

NHS England has now directed NHS Digital, under the COVID-19 Public Health NHS England Directions, to establish and operate a system for the collection and analysis of information about child protection in response to the increased risk to vulnerable children due to the impact of the coronavirus pandemic.

The purpose is to share child protection information with the current healthcare providers and further care settings, to heighten awareness of the children at risk and enable those with statutory duty to safeguard and promote the welfare of children, to fulfil their obligations.

The CP-IS will operate in the current settings (as above) for these purposes and be extended to:

• mental health settings (unscheduled and scheduled)
• sexual health settings (unscheduled) 
• dental settings (unscheduled and scheduled) 
• community paediatrics

View a copy of the COVID-19 Public Health NHS England Directions 2020.

Data sharing and dissemination

Health audit data is collected for audit and monitoring purposes under s254 of the Health and Social Care Act 2012, for the purposes of audit and monitoring necessary for managing the operation of the CP-IS system.

This data is made available to the recipients under s261(4) of the Health and Social Act 2012, which allows NHS Digital to make information collected available to those where it could be lawfully disclosed by those NHS Digital collected the information from.

Organisations accessing the CP-IS system all have a legal obligation under s11 of the Children’s Act to safeguard and promote the welfare of children. This duty gives a lawful basis to share the information in order to fulfil their obligation.

Following receipt of the request to share the CP-IS system data to mental, sexual, dental and community paediatrics healthcare for child health safeguarding, NHS Digital has, as required under section 258 of the Health and Social Care Act 2012, consulted with the following persons:

The person who issued the Directions:

• The Department of Health and Social Care; and NHS England

The person who made the request:

• National Safeguarding Lead, NHS England and NHS Improvement

Representatives of other persons who NHS Digital considers are likely to use the information to which the request relates: 

• Association of Directors of Public Health (Commissioners of Health Visiting & School Nursing)
• Association of Directors of Children’s Services

Representatives of persons from whom any information will be collected:

• Local Authority Chief Executives and Council Leaders via the Local Government Association (LGA)
• Association of Directors of Children’s Services

Such other persons as NHS Digital considers appropriate:

• Public Health England

Identifiable patient-level information will be collected as a data extract from the CP-IS system on the NHS Spine.

The data collected will be the:

1. LA Code (source organisation ODS code) – used to identify which local authority the data came from and the responsibility for the child.
2. NHS Number – used to identify the child or mother.
3. Date of birth of child (or mother if there is an unborn child protection plan in place).
4. CPO type – derived information that indicates the type of plan that exists, such as a Child Protection Plan, an Unborn Child Protection Plan, or if a child has been designated a Looked After Child.
5. Start date – of the care plan, to advise where a care plan is active so that the statutory safeguarding actions can be put in place.
6. End date – of the care plan, to advise where care plans are no longer active.
7. Date and time stamp of the last record update from the Spine.

The NHS audit data of access to CP-IS to be collected is: 

1. Date time stamp of unscheduled healthcare access to CP-IS data.
2. Viewers name from the unscheduled healthcare setting seeing the child.
3. Role of the person in the unscheduled healthcare setting seeing the child. 
4. Organisation (source organisation ODS code) used to identify which NHS trust/organisation seeing the child.

NHS Digital provides the CP-IS system through which Local Authorities submit information for sharing with authorised healthcare professionals.  NHS Digital will extract the required information directly from CP-IS on the NHS Spine. 

The CP-IS system will make the local authority CP-IS flag available, and create an audit report for each access to the record. This health audit data will go back to the LA.

The CP-IS flag and health audit data will be accessed by each of the 11 settings listed.

Each time any user for each of the 11 settings listed above accesses the CP-IS record they will be presented with the health audit data of the past 25 times the record was viewed.

The information will then be provided to healthcare professionals via the Summary Care Record application, commissioned by NHS England.

Collection start date: 14 December 2020 at 4 pilot trust sites for at least 8 weeks before confirming any wider rollout.

First submission date: not applicable

Subsequent submission dates: not applicable

Publication dates: not applicable

Collection end date: 31 March 2021 or until such time as the COVID-19 direction is revoked.

Data quality

Data quality issues are handled through the business as usual local processes.

Burden

A burden assessment has not been needed for this activity.