Hello my name is Hilary Garratt.
NHS England is delighted to be leading the implementation of the Child Protection Information
Sharing programme.
This programme is really important for us to be able to protect our most vulnerable
children.
Linking up information is really really key, and anything that underpins that is going
to make a difference and will help to make children safer.
So the system that is being proposed here, is being taken forward, is really key to joining
up disparate pieces of information to help to make a complete picture.
And this is important because we see in around 60 percent of serious case reviews, the top
end of where tragic incidents have happened for children, that information sharing is
a key component, one of the things that doesn’t happen well enough and contributes to children
not being protected and not being safeguarded properly.
So information sharing is absolutely fundamental.
It’s vital to making children safe and it has to happen, and we have to have the systems
in place that will support that happening to protect children.
This is a simple guide to how the Child Protection Information Sharing System works.
At the heart of the Child Protection Information Sharing System is information: Information
about vulnerable children who are more at risk of abuse or neglect.
All across England, the local authority case management system will produce files that
will be used by the Child Protection Information Sharing System.
Each file will contain the NHS number of the child, or mother, the type of plan, the start
and end date of the plan, and contact information for the social services department.
Once the file is created by the local authority it is encrypted and then securely transferred
to the Health and Social Care Information Centre to be processed and then entered in
the Child Protection Information Sharing System as part of the national NHS Spine.
All information stored on the spine is kept secure, with access limited to only authorized
users and accredited connected systems.
All access to the Child Protection Information Sharing System records is audited.
As part of their registration process, whether the child is presented at the hospital, an
out-of-hours general practice, or walk-in centre, the unscheduled care setting will
verify and confirm the child’s NHS number.
This is then used to query the Child Protection Information Sharing System.
Details of the querying organisation’s name, in addition to the name and role of the healthcare
worker accessing the record will be included in this query message.
If the query is successful and the child is in the Child Protection Information Sharing
System, information about the child from the local authority is returned to the computer
system at the NHS organisation providing that child’s care.
How this information is displayed, and what business workflow it invokes in the local
system, is determined by local policies and procedures.
The information received from the querying organisation is written to a file by the Child
Protection Information Sharing System, and once a day, securely passed back to the local
authority, detailing whose child record was accessed.
This keeps social care teams informed so that they can plan a visit or other intervention
if necessary.
All in all it’s about joining information together, so that the various caring professions
can achieve the best outcomes for vulnerable children.
The benefits of this information working both ways, though clearly for the child at the
point of care, being recognized as vulnerable, at the other end the local authorities now
can receive information where that child has attended, which hospitals he has attended,
and which clinicians he has seen.
Be they looked after, or on a care plan, when they attend A&E, the fact that they have been
looked for and found will be registered back on the CP-IS service.
CP-IS then will return that information back to the local authorities where the child’s
plan originated from.
Over time we’d expect to see the child attend more care settings, an audit trail, an event
trail coming up on CP-IS, so that when a social worker looks at his record locally, he’ll
see that the child has attended a number of different care settings over a period of time.
Now obviously, some of those will be quite innocent, but he has an opportunity to contact
an individual care setting and ask why that child attended, and that will help him take
a view about whether that child is at any more risk than otherwise, so that’s how
across the interface between health and social care, the exchange of information is going
to be improved.
http://systems.hscic.gov.uk/cpis