Five sites were selected as Social Care Personal Demographics Service early adopters, following the evaluation of proposals submitted in response to a Call for Expressions of Interest, issued in the autumn by NHS Connecting for Health (NHS CFH).

This project is working with a small number of local authorities and their social care systems suppliers, to upgrade the systems to comply with the information governance requirements of the NHS Care Records Service.

It is also to link them to the Personal Demographics Service (PDS), so that social workers can accurately identify individuals for whom they are providing care jointly with the NHS and share demographics information with the NHS. The sites and suppliers selected as early adopters were:

• Cheshire County Council and Esprit
• London Borough of Greenwich and Core Logic
• Slough Borough Council and Liquid Logic
• Torbay Care Trust and In4Tek
• Newham and OLM

Linking social care systems to the PDS will ensure that both services are talking about the same patient and thus reduce the possibility of an identity mix-up.

It will also mean that people receiving both health and social care services do not have to repeatedly give the same information to all agencies when, for example, they change their address or other demographic information and that all services have the latest information available to them.

The early adopters will need to demonstrate compliance with the information governance requirements for the NHS Care Records Service, as set out in the NHS Care Records Guarantee, to implement links between their social care systems and the NHS Personal Demographics Service. This will include going through a compliance process operated by NHS CFH, known as the Common Assurance Process.

The project aims to:

• test the feasibility of linking social care systems to the NHS Personal Demographics Service to enable social care professionals to obtain NHS numbers and other demographic information and to provide a basis for further information sharing with the NHS
• have an approved version of each of the participant suppliers' solutions which may be made available subsequently by each supplier, for purchase by customers wishing to integrate their social care systems with the Spine
• identify, investigate and where possible resolve any issues involved in linking social care systems to the NHS Personal Demographics Service
• tailor the NHS CFH Common Assurance Process (CAP) and data quality processes for social care specifics
• learn lessons which can be used to inform subsequent roll-out and the CAF demonstrators which will be a later programme of work.

Benefits

The benefits of linking to the Personal Demographics Service will include:

• a common identifier to provide the basis for communicating care information safely
• the latest demographic information being available to those providing care to an individual patient or service user
• patients and service users not having to repeat changes to demographic information to all those professionals involved in their care
• death notifications being communicated so that care professionals can respond sensitively.

Project update

The early adopters plan to go live with links to the Personal Demographics Service in the Autumn of 2009. Suppliers are currently developing their care management system software to enable it to link to the PDS and planning entry to the NHS CFH test environment shortly.

The systems will go through a rigorous testing and assurance process organised by NHS CFH to ensure that they can connect safely and securely to the Spine. NHS CFH is holding workshops with all sites to support the developments. Any access to NHS information by social services will be strictly subject to the consent individual patient/service user.

One of the early adopters, Slough Borough Council, decided to withdraw from the SCPEA programme because of other commitments. Their supplier, Liquid Logic, is continuing to work with other local authorites through the Common Assessment Framework (CAF) demonstrator programme and plans to implement the software in one of the CAF demonstrators.