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PATIENT SAFETY
Safeguarding children via connectivity
Accredited by NHS Digital, InterSystems has been working with NHS Trusts to enable streamlined adoption of Child Protection Information Sharing. With urgency being placed on faster and wider uptake, pioneer sites could offer lessons for national acceleration, helping frontline staff across the country safeguard children.
For any health or social care professional, safeguarding vulnerable children in their care is one of the highest priorities. Providing staff with information to easily identify when a child they are treating may be at risk of abuse, has consequently become a paramount objective. Responding to concerns raised in tragic child abuse cases, and to findings from the Report of the Children and Young People’s Health Outcomes Forum,1
ministers first
announced the Child Protection Information Sharing (CP-IS) system in late 2012. Set up to help save lives, CP-IS was created to provide frontline unscheduled care professionals with instant access to vital information - background that can quickly
inform a decision to contact relevant social services when a child may be at risk. Doctors and nurses are able to instantly see, via a flag on the child’s record, if the individual they are treating is subject to a child protection or a looked after child plan by the local authority. Through access to CP- IS, healthcare providers can configure their own systems so that professionals can also see when children have frequently attended emergency departments or urgent care centres. Where appropriate, unborn children can even be flagged on a mother’s record. Local authorities using the system have drawn on the NHS number, so that vulnerable children in their care can be flagged up and identified by health professionals, whether the
child arrives at their local hospital or at any unscheduled care setting in the country signed up to the system.
Tangible results, but wider uptake needed
CP-IS has started to enable important results for safeguarding. In some cases this means substantially faster notification of a child’s attendance in the emergency department. In another case, recounted by a senior NHS official, a vulnerable young woman came into A&E. Subject of a child protection order, she was pregnant and her unborn child also had a child protection plan. None of this was disclosed by the woman, but because of CP-IS, the emergency team was able to alert child protection staff. Approximately 60,000 at-risk children are so far covered by CP-IS, with more than 1000 alerts now generated in a month. However, there is a long way to go to create the national picture necessary to protecting children whichever part of the country they travel to and whichever unscheduled care provider they visit. With only 14% of health organisations and fewer than a third of local authorities using CP-IS as of March 2017, renewed vigour for widespread adoption is now being encouraged from the centre. Beverley Bryant, NHS Digital’s former director for digital transformation, is among those to emphasise the importance of the system, calling for wider rollout of the ‘useful’ technology.
Having extended ambitious project milestones, NHS Digital’s trajectory for CP-IS rollout is that by March 2019 some 90% of local authorities will be live, and that it will cover 80% of the NHS. Nevertheless, with repeated extensions and initial slow uptake, there are important lessons to be learnt from pioneer adopters where CP-IS has been deployed with relative ease, to now help health and social care organisations across the country protect children.
JUNE 2018
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