Reference guide
This reference guide provides information for our digital services.
Direct care
Many of our services say they can only be used for 'direct care'. Direct care is defined in Information: To share or not to share? The Information Governance Review (opens as a PDF).
Specifically, it says:
Direct care: A clinical, social or public health activity concerned with the prevention, investigation and treatment of illness and the alleviation of suffering of individuals.
It includes supporting individuals’ ability to function and improve their participation in life and society. It includes the assurance of safe and high quality care and treatment through local audit, the management of untoward or adverse incidents, person satisfaction including measurement of outcomes undertaken by one or more registered and regulated health or social care professionals and their team with whom the individual has a legitimate relationship for their care.
The restriction of a service to direct care can result from legal, policy or funding constraints:
- NHS England can only act within its statutory powers (or ‘vires’). These can be explicitly set out in legislation or arise as result of 'directions', and can contain restrictions on the service scope.
- If a service were to be used for something other than direct care, other considerations and service specific policies could apply, for example National Data Opt-out.
- The funding for specific services may also be conditional on it being used for direct care.
Service levels
Each of our digital services has a service level which defines how available it is and how quickly we fix issues.
Whilst we expect to meet these service levels, they are not guaranteed, and we will not be liable to you if we do not meet them.
The service levels are as follows:
| Service Level Agreement (SLA) for services | Bronze |
Silver |
Silver Plus | Gold | Platinum |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Business support hours (service support hours) | 8am to 6pm, Monday to Friday (excluding bank holidays) |
8am to 6pm, Monday to Friday (excluding bank holidays) |
24 hours a day, 365 days a year | 24 hours a day, 365 days a year |
24 hours a day, 365 days a year |
| Availability | Minimum of 98% | Minimum of 99.50% | Minimum of 99.50% | Minimum of 99.90% |
Minimum of 99.90% |
| Incident resolution times (Monday to Friday, 8am to 6pm, excluding bank holidays) | |||||
| Priority 1 | 8 hours | 4 hours | 4 hours (24 hours a day, 365 days a year) | 4 hours (24 hours a day, 365 days a year) | 2 hours (24 hours a day, 365 days a year) |
| Priority 2 | 16 hours | 8 hours | 8 hours (24 hours a day, 365 days a year) | 8 hours (24 hours a day, 365 days a year) | 4 hours (24 hours a day, 365 days a year) |
| Priority 3 | 40 hours | 20 hours | 20 hours | 10 hours | 8 hours |
| Priority 4 | 120 hours | 80 hours | 80 hours | 50 hours | 30 hours |
| Priority 5 | 240 hours | 200 hours | 200 hours | 140 hours | 100 hours |
Business support hours (service support hours)
This is the time during which new incidents which have been logged to the service desk will be picked up by support teams beyond the service desk for progression and investigation in accordance to the fix time Service Level agreement (SLA) for the service.
Availability
This refers to the extent to which the Service is operational and accessible when required for use. It is calculated as a percentage of up-time (the amount of time the system is operational and available) against the number of minutes within targeted operational hours for a given month.
Incident resolution times
This refers to the maximum amount of time it should take to resolve an incident from the moment it is identified/reported until it is fully resolved. The time is based on the time the incident is open for investigation with NHS England or its third-party providers between Monday and Friday, 8am to 6pm (excluding bank holidays), unless stated by exception as 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.
Service types
Our service catalogue includes a few different types of entry, as explained below.
Services
An individual service:
- helps a user achieve an outcome
- usually has a single service owner
Services typically consist of:
- digital (IT) assets - sometimes called products or sub-services
- people - for example to run the service or manage onboarding
As you might expect, most of our services are digitally driven, but a few of them are primarily human-powered.
Service groups
A service group is a set of related services, such as screening services.
The services within the group are usually also listed individually within the catalogue.
Programmes
A programme is a team of people that is delivering some kind of change to the health and social care system in England.
We only include a programme in the catalogue if it is delivering change directly to the broader health and social care system - if a programme is delivering a new national service, we include the service in the catalogue, not the programme.
Status
We tag our digital services with a status as follows:
- in development - the service is in progress - specifications might be available and any APIs might be available for early testing
- beta - the service is available for live use, but is still being worked on to make sure it is fit for purpose
- live - the service is out of beta - ongoing improvements might still happen
- deprecated - the service is still live but is planned for retirement
- retired - the service is no longer available
Last edited: 20 June 2025 9:04 am