National Events Management Service (NEMS)

The National Events Management Service (NEMS) allows digital health and care services to notify other digital services that an ‘event’ has occurred, using ‘publish-subscribe’ messages – sometimes called ‘push notifications’.

Events can be:

• clinical or non-clinical
• relating to a patient or not
• issued by a national service or a local service

Examples of events include:

• a patient’s birth
• a patient’s death
• a newborn child’s vaccinations

Publish-subscribe messages allow multiple interested parties (‘subscribers’) to be notified of an event (from a ‘publisher’). For example, when a child is vaccinated, this might be of interest to their GP, their local authority and child health services.

It works like this:

1. Interested parties contact NEMS (via an API) to subscribe to specific types of event, such as death notifications in a specific geographical region.
2. When an event occurs, the source system publishes an event notification to NEMS.
3. NEMS sends the event notification to all subscribers.

Event publishers are usually national services, such as the Personal Demographics Service. NEMS also supports non-national use cases.

When a digital service subscribes to NEMS, it needs to specify:

• the event type, such as "birth notifications"
• the event scope they are interested in

The event scope can be:

• explicit - a specific patient
• generic - a cohort of patients, such as all patients registered with a specific GP, or all patients within a specific geographical boundary

NEMS supports two variants of event notifications:

1. Detailed notifications – the subscriber receives full details of the event along with the notification.
2. Lightweight notifications – the subscriber receives a notification that an event has occurred, with limited details such as the event type and affected patient. The subscriber must then contact the published (via an API) to request full details.

NEMS consists of three separate products, as follows:

NEMS is for:

• systems that need to share information with more than one other system - these are 'event publishers'

• systems that are interested in notifications published via NEMS - these are 'event subscribers'

It can be used in a variety of care settings but only for the purpose of direct care.

Event publishers are usually national services, such as the Personal Demographics Service, but NEMS does also support non-national use cases.

It is primarily intended for use in England but in some circumstances it supports a wider geography.

Event publishers and subscribers access NEMS via its APIs.

Examples of use include:

• The Personal Demographics Service notifying interested parties that a patient's demographic information has changed, including their phone number or email address. GP systems can use this notification to update their local copy of the patient's details, so when they contact the patient they are using up-to-date contact information.
• The Personal Demographics Service notifying interested parties of a patient's death. The Electronic Prescription Service and community pharmacy systems can use this information to cancel any pending prescriptions for the patient.
• A learning management system (LMS) in an NHS trust notifying interested parties that an NHS employee has completed or refreshed a training course. The Digital Staff Passport service can use this notification to update the employee's passport, which makes life easier when they move to a different NHS trust.

Event types

The following table summarises the supported event types.

Event publishers

This service is recommended for all national services that need to publish notifications to multiple interested parties.

Event subscribers

This service is recommended for all health and care systems that would benefit from receiving the supported event types.

The following services are related to NEMS: