Digital service which gives access to child health information is launched

NHS Digital and NHS England have collaborated with IT suppliers to create a new service which allows access to child health information.

The National Events Management Service pushes out automated notifications of births, changes of address and GP practices to make sure that care services know where every child is.

It ensures that all involved in the care of children have appropriate access to information such as which preventive interventions a child has received, in order to improve the speed of diagnosis and treatment.

Data is also forwarded to a digital red book offered to mothers as an alternative to the current paper red book.

The child health data is built around new information standards for the Healthy Child Programme which was released by the Professional Records Standards Body (PRSB) last year.

Martin Dennys, Programme Manager for Digital Child Health at NHS Digital said: “Child health information is currently held across a number of different information systems across the UK.

“The National Events Management Service supports the communication between these systems and is an important milestone in the journey to deliver more personalised, responsive and integrated services to families and children.

“We now look forward to supporting suppliers in rolling the service out more widely.”

The service has initially launched in North East London in partnership with North East London Foundation Trust (NELFT) and their health visiting and child health services.

The IT system suppliers supporting the trust are System C, Servelec and Sitekit. They have all collaborated with NHS Digital to connect their systems to the new service.

Beverley Bryant, chief operating officer for the System C & Graphnet Care Alliance, said: “We are really pleased to be involved in such an important step in the development of the Healthy Child programme.

“This project is a great example of how interoperability helps improve care.  System C is committed to open APIs and are adopting the FHIR interfacing standard precisely to make possible the sharing of health and care information nationally which this project delivers.”

The scope of the National Events Management Service will evolve over time, working in conjunction with other local and national services, to support the whole of the Healthy Child Programme pathway and the availability of NHS-held clinical information to parents via digital red books.