PATIENT SAFETY
Where Trusts have made deployment easy
Homerton University Hospital NHS Foundation Trust became the first NHS provider to go live with real-time access to CP-IS in 2014. Determined to spearhead national adoption, the Trust concluded that it would be too costly and time-consuming to develop and certify integrations between its individual IT systems and NHS Digital’s centrally held CP-IS database. Instead the Trust worked with InterSystems to connect to CP-IS, using the HealthShare informatics platform, accredited by NHS Digital. In practice child protection information is transmitted securely from local authority IT systems to the central NHS Spine. InterSystems HealthShare is used at Homerton to access the Spine and incorporate CP-IS information into the hospital’s electronic patient record (EPR) to notify professionals when they are treating a vulnerable child. Laura Stewart, named nurse for safeguarding children at Homerton, said: “If a child attends A&E having never done so before, and that child is on a child protection plan or a looked after child plan, as soon as the record is created it is linked up with their NHS number, providing a flag that informs the health professional if there is a child protection or looked after child plan in place. “Before we went live with CP-IS there was a risk that the health professional would be unaware of this key information, unless parents disclosed and informed the professional their child is on a plan.” The system means that this information is now available in a much more timely fashion from neighbouring local authorities and any social care provider using CP-IS. “The volume of patients in A&E would have made it impossible to call social care for every child that attended,” asserted Stewart. “Having this system in place is much safer.
We don’t rely solely on parents informing the staff that they are known to children’s social care. Before we would get information from our local authority, but an alert would be manually placed on the record. It could take at least 10 working days for the child protection plan to be updated on the record. What’s more, if a child lives in another area - such as Waltham Forest - we wouldn’t have had access to that information at all.” Stewart stressed that only relevant and
proportionate information is shared through the system, and only accessed by those involved in direct care. For example, the system might inform the clinician of a child protection plan, that there has been
emotional abuse, that the relevant authority is the London Borough of Hackney and provide a phone number. But this is making a difference.
“In one case we had a child who hadn’t been to Homerton A&E before,” she noted. “The parents were adamant their child wasn’t known to social care, but a CP-IS alert informed staff they were known to Chelsea and Westminster Hospital on the other side of London, identifying a child protection plan. This allowed us to better safeguard that child.” Having this information accessible in the EPR has been key. “I already have half a dozen systems that I use every day,” Stewart noted. “To have another system requiring
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.
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