Spine Directory Service

The Spine Directory Service (SDS) is a national database of health and social care organisations, workers and IT systems.

Specifically, it contains:

• organisations - NHS organisations, their sites and departments, as retrieved from the Organisation Data Service (ODS)
• people - health and social care workers who access national digital services via the Care Identity Service
• IT systems - that connect to our national services and are thus registered as 'accredited systems'
• reference data - of various types, such as national RBAC 'baselines'

Information is created, updated and retrieved from SDS in a number of different ways.

A full explanation is not provided here, but a common way to retrieve information from SDS is via various APIs.

Health and social care software can access the information in SDS using the following APIs:

• CIS2 Authentication (for accessing information on the currently signed in healthcare worker)
• Healthcare Worker FHIR API (for accessing information on healthcare workers who are not currently signed in)
• Spine Directory Service FHIR API (for accessing accredited system details only)
• Organisation Data Terminology FHIR API (for accessing organisation data - actually sourced from Organisation Data Service, not SDS)
• Spine Directory Service LDAP API (for accessing all data items - but deprecated and planned for retirement at some point)

For details on what data SDS holds, see Data scope and quality.

We are planning to retire the Spine Directory Service LDAP API at some point.

Before we do, we'll make sure the replacement APIs support existing use cases.