Partner service management

NHS England has provided service management capabilities for a number of years. These capabilities are available to partners, who are using NHS login as a service, in the event of user or system performance incidents, problem management or early live service support.

The NHS login team, supported by our First Line Service Desk, use established tools and well-developed processes to respond to customer enquiries within an agreed time.

As part of the integration process, partners are asked to provide evidence that they have the capability to manage their own user’s incidents and problem records which, for the NHS login elements of the service, forms part of NHS Digital’s systems and processes.

This guidance describes the individual elements that are provided by the NHS login service management team, which in turn supports users of partner services.
 

Incidents relating to the use of NHS login come in a variety of types.

This includes:

• users experiencing problems accessing your service
• users experiencing problems proving their identity
• connected or reliant services being unavailable

Each of these types of incident have been categorised by severity (1 to 5) and require different levels of response, as their impact on the service and users varies. The process and recording of each incident remains consistent and uses NHS Digital’s incident management software.

1. User identifies a problem with their service
2. Raises to partner service (known as an “incident”)
3. Partner investigates whether it’s a known problem
4. Raised to NHS login First Line Service Desk (Service Level Agreement measurement starts, and incident severity assigned)
5. Response provided or forwarded to NHS login DevOps
6. Incident triaged, investigated, fixed or recorded as a new problem
7. Response provided to partner service
8. Response provided to the user

To aid the resolution of each incident, a minimum amount of data relating to the incident is required.

This includes:

• date and time
• user email address
• error type
• issue description
• device type (mobile, tablet, PC or laptop)
• operating system type and version
• error codes (if recorded)
• screenshots (if available)

Please do not send patient identifiable data (such as last name or NHS number).

In the event NHS login needs to contact the partner in relation to an incident, the contact details that the partner has provided (in the National Service Desk registration form) will be used, if an alternative contact method has not been provided in the incident contact.

Higher severity service incidents relating to the use of NHS login may include users having access to the wrong information. If the NHS login team defines an incident as a HSSI, partners must co-operate and engage as required irrespective of their own definition and assessment of the severity of the incident.

Partners must notify the NHS login team of any HSSIs which impact the service within 30 minutes of them happening, within their hours of operation. Partners must also provide updates on the status of each reported HSSI, which must include the minimum data set applicable to the HSSI until resolution.

Partners should have a HSSI Manager, which is a single point of contact that has the necessary skills, knowledge and experience to resolve incidents in the shortest possible timeframe. The partners on duty HSSI Manager shall attend and contribute to a Multi-Party Intervention within 30 minutes of notification by the Service Bridge.

1. Potential data breach or other HSSI identified by partner
2. Partner raises a call with Service Bridge
3. Partner/Service Bridge prioritise the incident to a severity level 1 or 2
4. Service Bridge is notified
5. Service Bridge contacts NHS login DevOps for investigation
6. NHS login provide comms to affected partner

Any feedback that highlights a previously unknown problem within the NHS login service creates a problem record. This is true whether it involves multiple incidents with the same root cause, an internally identified bug or external feedback.

Problem records are published for partners on our problems and fixes page and are resolved via our problem management process.

The number of incidents raised against problem records helps to prioritise possible resolutions that can be developed and released as a fix to a particular problem.

NHS login works within a DevOps and Agile environment, which allows for feature developments that can be applied to the product on a regular basis. Regular changes, fixes and releases enables the NHS login product to constantly evolve in support of demand from partner and stakeholders.

The cycle of releases is not fixed but follows a pattern that is controlled by the delivery of capability within Agile development. Our current development format is a two-week cycle that aims to deliver feature updates on a weekly basis.

The supporting process and communication to partners is as follows:

1. Features that are in consideration for each development Agile sprint are communicated to partners before the sprint commences.
2. Partners are informed when major changes that have an impact to them will be made available to test against the relevant integration environment.
3. The contents of each release are made available on our service updates and releases page before each release.
4. The NHS login service is updated.

Note: The duration of each step described above is subject to assurance approval, both at several levels within NHS England and by partners, and therefore can be altered at any time if it is deemed unsafe to approve.

Additional support

In support of a partner onboarding, the NHS login service management team can, by request, provide:

• service incident rehearsals – end to end test of the incident management process
• early live service support – frequency most appropriate for the partner service
• service reviews – frequency most appropriate for the partner service

NHS login First Line Service Desk
https://help.login.nhs.uk/