Technical

This area of work should be led by your IT lead. It outlines the different steps that need to be completed in order for staff to be able to securely access CP-IS information. 

There are a number of different ways that healthcare organisations can implement CP-IS technically. If you are implementing using an integrated solution you will need to engage early and throughout the process with your system supplier.

Check that each of the unscheduled care settings going live with CP-IS has access to NCRS.   If any settings do not already have access to NCRS, you may need to revisit task 11. If all settings going live in this implementation already use NCRS, move to step 14.

Verify that all sites that plan to go live with CP-IS already have connection to the Personal Demographics Service (PDS), or if not, obtain a connection.

Please visit the Personal Demographics Service for further information about PDS. You can also contact the NHS England National Service Desk to initiate a request on 0300 303 5035 or [email protected].

Computer systems which access NHS England services through the Spine must meet certain technical standards. If you are new to the Personal Demographics Service (PDS) or NCRS, you are advised to contact your local and/or regional IT/CSU team to ensure these are in place.  

Further information about Spine technical information: Warrantied Environment Specification (WES) is available. 

The NHS Spine has very high levels of service reliability, however it is important to ensure that you have effective contingency processes in place should the CP-IS service be unavailable for any period (either nationally or locally).  Any local issues/outages should be reported to your local service desk or system supplier and escalated to NHS England where required via the Incident Support Model (see Appendix E). 

Ensure that CP-IS is added into your organisation’s business continuity and disaster recovery plans.  You might want to consider:

• what is the criticality period for service downtime
• will you need a different approach for planned and unplanned downtime
• what priority does the CP-IS service take alongside other services affected by system downtime
• how will you know if there is an issue with the central Spine service? (You may wish to consider signing up for NHS England service status alerts)
• accountability for routinely checking that CP-IS is working, particularly when you make changes to your technical infrastructure