Wigan Council adopts NHS number as unique ID

Wigan Council has become one of the first English councils to connect health to social care services information after linking to the NHS Spine and adopting the NHS number as its unique identifier for all clients.

The project represents a significant improvement in patient safety, reducing data duplication, confusion cases and the fragmentation of care caused by inconsistent systems and records.

The council successfully linked to the NHS Spine’s Strategic Tracing Service (NSTS) to obtain NHS numbers that were loaded into its Swift social care information system and Integrated Child Information System (ICS) both supplied by Anite.

The council used integration technology from Anite to securely import NHS numbers for over 76,000 current social care clients from the NSTS into SWIFT and ICS, removing the risk of human error and time associated with manual inputting.

It says ‘almost 100 per cent’ of its adult and child clients are now accurately matched to their records using validated NHS numbers as the unique ID for all health and social care clients.

The move ensures all Wigan’s social care clients, who have records within Swift, have their records matched to their validated NHS numbers. This marks an important step enabling Wigan to integrate with the NHS Spine, to ensure effective joined-up health and social care working and joint commissioning.

The NHS Spine in the core of the £12bn NHS IT programme providing a database of patient information, beginning with their NHS number and demographic details. In the future this is set to grow to include an electronic summary care record – the Summary Care Record (SCR).

The SCR summary record will be created from local records, help on local systems, which will automatically upload important information onto the SCR.

As yet the NHS Spine, and SCR which is just beginning pilots, does not yet extend to social care providers and their electronic systems. However, the move by Wigan to link client records to the NSTS-supplied NHS number is an important first step to allow future integration.

Steve Corns, IT service manager of the department of adult services, Wigan Council, said: “We’ve long recognised that further down the line social care departments will need to integrate fully with the NHS Spine to share patient information safely, efficiently and accurately. It will mean that wherever and whenever a patient seeks care, those treating them will have secure access to summary information and the care plan to assist with diagnosis and care.”

Corns said that the NHS number is now visible within both the Anite Swift system and Anite’s ICS. This removed the need for the council’s Looked After Children (LAC) service to identify and manually input the NHS number into child records.

"This number is used as a unique child ID in multi-agency working, for NHS LAC nurses to match their health records and LAC health assessments," explained Corns. "It also captures essential data for statutory returns such as dental and immunisations which councils are required to report on. Manually inputting the NHS numbers was previously a considerable administration chore and overhead with considerable risk of human error. This will now become an electronic process with little manual intervention required, therefore greatly reducing the risk of error.”

He added that by linking to NSTS the Council receives electronic NSTS ‘Deceased Patient Notifications’, enabling the department to immediately update Swift. "Our local PCT and acute Trust have been very supportive of this project and we are all now keen to develop local systems integration to support SAP [Single Assessment Process], CAF [Common Assessment Framework], CfH [Connecting for Health], joint commissioning and other local and national information sharing initiatives and requirements.”

Wigan is now developing NHS-style procedures to enable their local SWIFT Support Team to maintain all current and new adult and children client NHS numbers on an ongoing basis by regular batch and online tracing via the NSTS.

Bernard Walker, director of adult services for Wigan Council said: “The NHS number is the key to effective information sharing and the integration of systems between the NHS and partner organisations to support a string of national and local health and social care initiatives such as the electronic health record. This is a huge step towards realising the vision of seamless patient care." 

Tony Barron, business development director, Anite, commented: “This represents a vital first step towards improving communications across the NHS and social care in order to provide people with high quality services in the communities where they live."

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