Implementation and integration

Thank you for taking the time to be with me today my name is Rahial Kazmi, I am a senior digital partnering manager and I work for Digital Partnering within NHS England. I'm also the CP-IS implementation lead.

The purpose of today's session is to provide an overview of Child Protection- Information Sharing, some of the benefits of accessing CP-IS, why you should be accessing CP-IS across your organisation and also how to access CP-IS within your organisation using something called NCRS which is the National Care Record Service.

Just to provide yourself with an overview of uh CP-IS. CP-IS is an England-wide information sharing program which standardises the sharing of safeguarding information directly from a local authority into the NHS.

We have unscheduled health services within the NHS that can access CP-IS. These organisations can include ED departments, walk-in centres, GP out of hours, 111 service, ambulance services and also non-elective admissions onto paediatric wards and also maternity services.

We also would like scheduled services to have access to CP-IS but those scheduled services are currently only primary care – that’s GP surgeries, community pediatrics, dentistry, mental health services, CAMS services, 0 to19 services which is health visitors and school nurses and also termination of pregnancy services.

The project initiated in 2014 and the first site that went live with CP-IS was back in 2015. It's a well established programme and has been around for quite some time.

We have every local authority in England currently live with CP-IS and we have just over 1200 care organisations live with CP-IS at the time of this recording. This is on the 19th of March [2024]. We are yet to roll out across phase 2 services but we're hoping to do that from April.

So why was CP-IS created? The need for Child Protection-Information Sharing –unfortunately there have been many cases which have led to children passing away or serious harm and neglect taking place to children.

There's been several high profiles – Peter Connelly, Victoria Climbié, Amanda Hutton just to name a few – who have unfortunately passed away. A lot of serious case reviews indicate a lack of information sharing. All of those particular profile cases that I mentioned – those children were failed essentially because there was a lack of information sharing and things could have happened that would have prevented those children from passing away.

Information sharing is identified as a key factor in the majority of serious case reviews and on the in the back of Lord Laming's report there was a need to have an England-wide or a national information sharing system which would reduce the possibility of serious case reviews taking place.

What I'm going to do now is just provide yourself a bit of an overview of how to use the system. For the purpose of the demonstration today we're accessing CP-IS through the National Care Record Service.

As you as you can see when you access the National Care Record Service you have to click onto the NCRS link at this point. It will allow you to log in via your smartcard so you have to have a smartcard to access this system.

You need to know your pin number at this point you can see you've got options to find a patient. The first option is to identify a patient through the NHS number.

The second option is to identify the patient through the gender, last name and date of birth. If you don't have the NHS number then you have other options, such as advanced details and that would allow yourself to widen, for instance, the spelling of the child if you're not too sure about the spelling of the child. You could put in wildcard characters in this as well.

The third option there is to identify a child through a postcode. The demographic details – if you don't have the NHS number – as you can imagine you may find several children with similar details so the best option obviously for you to access is via the NHS number.

In this example we're using a test patient. We typed in the NHS number, we've clicked on to find patient and this child has a protection plan and you can see that by the orange button there.

When you click onto that button it will load up child protection plan. This particular child has a child protection plan and you can see the details there start date and end date, the name of the local authority contact telephone numbers and an emergency telephone number and in hours telephone number.

You can also see the previous attendances for this particular child and that's quite beneficial for yourself in terms of identifying where this child has gone in to receive care.

With regards to CP-IS the information that you will see is whether a child has a protection plan, whether a child is looked after and also Unborn Child Protection Plan.

The Unborn Child Protection Plan will sit on the mother's record you will have start date and an end date. The reason for having an end date is uh CP-IS will still show information for children who've come off a plan in the last year. The reason for that is because we know that children can still be vulnerable after they've recently come off a plan. Some children are on step down plans and we've had some instances in the past where children have gone back onto a plan.

The previous accesses will be sent back to the local authority. Every time a child goes in to receive care in an unscheduled setting, for example ED, there will be an automated alert that goes back to the local authority. That's quite beneficial for the local authority because the allocated social worker will know where this child is going to receive care.

The notification that goes back isn't necessary a means of communication so we would still advise if you have a query or a concern regarding a child you should contact the allocated social worker or the social care team using the telephone numbers that you have in CP-IS.

However, the alert does benefit the local authority for them to understand where the child is going to receive care.

If you are accessing the CP-IS in scheduled services such as a GP practice or 0 to 19 services, there will not be an alert that goes back to the local authority. That's just an automated thing for yourself as the feedback that we've had with local authorities is that they wouldn't benefit from having alerts from a scheduled appointment.

In terms of accessing CP-IS hope you found this useful. You can go onto our website, there's step-by-step implementation guide on how to deploy CP-IS, there is a user guide for CP-IS using NCRS and there's some other material on the website as well.

Thank you very much.