Spine Directory Service

The Spine Directory Service (SDS) is a national database of health and social care organisations, workers and IT systems.

Specifically, it contains:

• organisations - NHS organisations, their sites and departments, as retrieved from the Organisation Data Service (ODS)
• people - health and social care workers who access national digital services via the Care Identity Service
• IT systems - that connect to our national services and are thus registered as 'accredited systems'

Information is created, updated and retrieved from SDS in a number of different ways.

A full explanation is not provided here, but a common way to retrieve information from SDS is via the SDS APIs.

Health and social care software can access the information in SDS using the following APIs:

• Spine Directory Service FHIR API (for accessing accredited system details only)
• Spine Directory Service LDAP API (for accessing all data items)

We are planning to deprecate the SDS LDAP API and are looking at alternative APIs for accessing organisation and healthcare worker information.

The solution for organisation information is likely to be via the Organisation Data Service (ODS) - either via one of its existing APIs or a new one.

We do not yet have a solution for healthcare worker information.