Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
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.