Project management, stakeholder engagement and governance

This area of work is about ensuring you have the right people with the right skills on board, and that you know how you will handle any problems or issues that come up during your project.

You will need the support of your director of nursing, chief information officer (CIO), safeguarding lead, and possibly your chief executive and senior management team. Securing this commitment at the outset will ensure that the project receives adequate priority and resource allocated to it.

Brief your senior managers on what CP-IS is, the benefits and why it is important that your organisation implements it. Initiate wider engagement with Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCGs), Local Safeguarding Children’s Boards (LSCBs) and children’s services within local authorities in your area and consider what role, if any, they might have for decision making or escalations within the project.

Each organisation should identify someone to act as the project lead or project coordinator.

This person will be the main point of contact for the project and for communicating with NHS England. They will be responsible for keeping track of who is doing what, and monitoring progress against the actions you agree, and ideally should have some project management expertise. This person could be a project manager but is usually a safeguarding or IT lead. 

CP-IS applies to scheduled and unscheduled care settings. It is important to understand the scope of the implementation within your organisation.

• emergency departments 
• minor injury units 
• walk-in centres 
• GP out-of-hours services 
• maternity units 
• paediatric wards
• ambulance services
• general practice
• community paediatrics
• dentistry
• 0-19 services (health visitors and school nurses)
• mental health services
• sexual health services (TOPS)

You should then decide whether you will implement CP-IS in all settings at the same time or do one at a time. 

CP-IS must not be used in any other care settings except those mentioned above as this may result in local authorities receiving notifications that they are not expecting.  (For staff working across scheduled and unscheduled care settings it is important that the CP-IS access arrangements are specific to their respective roles).

To implement CP-IS you will need: 

• a safeguarding lead 
• an IT lead  
• a business manager
• an information governance lead 
• a registration authority lead
• a lead from each of your unscheduled care settings 

Identify someone in each of these teams who will support the CP-IS project and are clear what their role on the project team is. 

As a project team, agree how decisions will be made and recorded. Define when an issue or risk to the project will be escalated, who will escalate it, and who they will escalate it to. Then have this agreed by your director of nursing and/or your leadership team so they are aware how you will escalate issues that need their attention or support. Don’t forget that you can contact the NHS England team for support at any time. We can help you through issues or put you in touch with other organisations to discuss the approach they took to overcome them.

It is useful to have an implementation plan in place that will enable you to track progress against key milestones (see template in Appendix A, with alternative formats available on request from your Implementation Manager). The project lead should keep in regular contact with each member of the project team and check progress against the actions you have agreed. This does not need to be done by bringing the whole team together at a meeting, but it can help when working through issues or at important stages of the project.  

It is important to identify and engage with your local health and social care partners so they are aware that you are implementing CP-IS. 

We recommend that you speak to the following stakeholders and try to maintain regular contact with them during your implementation project.  Consider putting a Communications Plan in place and/or engaging with your communications team for support.

External:

• commissioners / clinical commissioning Groups (CCGs)
• Local Safeguarding Children’s Boards (LSCBs) - we recommend getting CP-IS implementation added as a regular agenda item so that local partners are kept informed of progress 
• children’s services departments at neighbouring local authorities – this will ensure that they know to expect notifications from you,                                                                                                  
• suppliers

safeguarding leads at neighbouring NHS trusts Internal:

• Registration Authority
• project team
• project board
• staff
• communications colleagues