Child Protection - Information Sharing - MESH

Use this integration to share information with Child Protection - Information Sharing (CP-IS) from a local authority social care setting. CP-IS is the national electronic database of child protection information.

Local authorities

As a local authority, you can:

• upload a patient's CP-IS information
• receive a notification when the patient's CP-IS information is accessed from an unscheduled care setting
• receive a notification of an inactive NHS number

Local authorities originally used a CP-IS client to transfer CP-IS data from their children’s social care systems to CP-IS. This was replaced by the MESH client which all local authorities now use to exchange information with CP-IS - see connections 1, 2 , 5 and 6 on the diagram.

Healthcare providers

To integrate with CP-IS from unscheduled or scheduled healthcare applications, use the Child Protection - Information Sharing HL7 V3 API.

Information held in CP-IS

CP-IS holds the following information for each registered patient:

• NHS number
• details of their plan - type, start date and end date
• details of the 25 most recent CP-IS information accesses from unscheduled care settings in England
• the name of the responsible local authority - together with their office hours phone and emergency duty contact numbers

Identifying patients

All records in CP-IS are held against the patient's NHS number. It is therefore very important to ensure you use the correct NHS number for each patient.

For more details, see CP-IS NHS number matching information.

This integration can only be used where there is a legal basis to do so. Make sure you have a valid use case before you go too far with your development.

You must do this before you can go live (see ‘Onboarding’ below). 

The following APIs are related to this API:

• Personal Demographics Service - FHIR API - use this to find the correct NHS number for a given patient
• Child Protection - Information Sharing HL7 V3 API - use this to integrate with CP-IS from unscheduled or scheduled healthcare applications

This integration is in production.

Further information in our roadmap.

This integration uses MESH which is a silver service, meaning it is operational 24 hours a day, 7 days a week but only supported during business hours (8am to 6pm), Monday to Friday excluding bank holidays.

For more details, see service levels.

This is an asynchronous messaging integration. Messages are sent and received via MESH.

You can access this integration via:

• the Health and Social Care Network (HSCN)
• the internet

For more details see Network access for APIs.

Local authorities now use the MESH client security and authorisation, rather than the old CP-IS client interface to this API.

You can test this integration using our Path to Live environments.

You need to get your software approved with us before it can go live with this integration. We call this onboarding. The onboarding process can sometimes be quite long, so it’s worth planning well ahead.

To onboard for this integration, contact [email protected].

CP-IS MESH uses the following MESH workflow IDs to communicate with local authorities, replacing the CP-IS domain messages shown: