Health and Social Care Network (HSCN) support and guidance

We’ve put together some high level guidance that may help our HSCN consumers including how to procure HSCN services, incident management information, service levels information and some useful good to knows.

If you want to procure a new HSCN service, you need to contact one of our accredited suppliers with your requirements
you may have contractual mechanisms in place to claim service credits from your CNSP
uder the HSCN Obligations Framework, CNSPs are required to resolve severity 1 incidents within 5 hours
there is a HSCN Consumer Handbook that explains the responsibilities of HSCN stakeholders
the CNSP should be providing, as a minimum, telephone access to their helpdesk
HSCN suppliers are required to meet a minimum standard for escalations and complaints
your HSCN supplier should be providing you with a report that describes your network bandwidth capacity usage and utilisation for the HSCN services you have purchased

Incident management

CNSPs are responsible for the end-to-end management of all network related incidents beyond the boundary of the consumer’s network. This incorporates a mixture of technical, operational, service and change management activities.

This means that incidents related to connectivity over the Peering Exchange, to another CNSP or to the Internet up to the boundary after the secure boundary solution are the responsibility of the consumer’s CNSP to progress through to resolution on behalf of their consumers.

CNSPs do not have responsibility for non-network related incidents such as application issues. If an issue has been raised with the CNSP that is identified as a non-network related incident, then the customer will be informed by the CNSP and will be responsible for the logging the incident with the appropriate resolving group.

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Incident handling

This section outlines the process for incident reporting around any part of your HSCN service.

Service levels

CNSPs shall comply with the minimum service levels set out in HSCN CNSP Service Management Requirement Addendum

These service levels apply during the service hours which are contracted between the HSCN consumer and the CNSP.

CNSPs should agree access level HSSI fix times with their consumers based on their requirements. The access level principles detailed in the severity definitions should be adhered to.

Further information on Service Levels can be found in the HSCN consumer handbook including escalation and complaints procedures.

Contact us

For incidents whereby a CNSP has failed at an obligation level, where you require support or wish to provide feedback, you can contact us

This is specifically for obligation level failure and not relating to local-level contract failures.

Last edited: 18 November 2024 9:41 am