Implementing Child Protection – Information Sharing (CP-IS) in health settings a step by step guide

This guide has been designed for staff in healthcare organisations who are responsible for implementing Child Protection - Information Sharing (CP-IS). 

CP-IS is an NHS project that is helping health and children’s social care staff to share information and protect society's most vulnerable children better. 

This guide provides step-by-step instructions on what you need to do to implement CP-IS via the National Care Records Service (NCRS), and who needs to be involved. Where an integrated solution is available to your organisation, you can also follow the steps in this guide, but you will need support from your system supplier at key stages of the process. (See p5-6 of this document for further information on the technical options for implementing CP-IS). 

This guide will enable you to get started and work through the various stages needed to implement CP-IS. At the back you will find an implementation plan template and some checklists that will help you work through the actions and monitor your organisation's progress. Find out more about what CP-IS is, why we need it and how it works. 

Further copies of this guide are available at (INSERT URL). If you have any feedback or suggestions about how we can improve it, please email us at [email protected]. 

Implementing CP-IS involves five key areas of work, each comprising some component tasks:

1. Project management, stakeholder engagement and governance (tasks 1-8)
2. Access and smartcards (tasks 8-9,)
3. Technical (tasks 10-13)
4. Business processes (tasks 14-22)
5. Go live/managing the live service (tasks 21-28)

This guide will take you through the different tasks involved in each of these areas. You can work on many of these tasks at the same time, rather than one after the other. Different people or teams might be best placed to take responsibility for each set of tasks. 

The appendices to this guide provide some additional reference material to support you CP-IS implementation.   

Appendix A – Index for this guide

Appendix B – Implementation plan template 

Appendix C – CP-IS NCRS user guide 

Appendix D – Auditing local CP-IS usage in NCRS using the Spine Reporting Service

Appendix E –Incident Support Model