Child protection database live in 2015

Children identified as vulnerable by social services will be flagged to NHS staff if they attend an A&E, starting in 2015.

The Department of Health announced the £8.6m Child Protection-Information Sharing project to co-ordinate NHS and social services data in December last year.

The first wave of the roll-out will see five local authorities and 38 NHS sites in North East London, Wakefield, North West England and North Tyneside, using the child protection database in 2015.

The database means NHS staff will be able to access information about children who are at risk, regardless of where in the country the child usually lives.

Opting out of the project, run by NHS England, is not an option.

The Health and Social Care Information Centre, which has been commissioned to develop the system, told EHI that if a child has a child protection plan, is in care, or a pregnant woman’s unborn child with a pre-birth protection plan, this will automatically be flagged if they attend A&E.

“During the standard process of registering a child for treatment at an unscheduled care setting, an indicator flag will appear on screen if the child is a ‘looked after’ child or if they have a child protection plan.”

NHS staff will also be able to see if a child has recently visited another A&E department in the country.

“The project is currently working to deliver a core solution that will reside on the NHS Spine; it will be ready to receive information from local authorities in 2014, and will start to make this information available to the NHS by 2015, with roll-out completed by 2018,” said the HSCIC spokesperson.

Another seven local authorities have signed up to send information once the system goes live.

This is not the first time the government has attempted something like this. ContactPoint, a children’s database set up by the previous Labour government in 2009 to record information about all children in England, was the subject of severe criticism and was scrapped after the coalition took over.

The HSCIC says in a statement on its website that this is “not another ContactPoint”.

“ContactPoint held the details of all children under the age of 18 in England, but CP-IS is a focused solution. The data it stores is for very specific categories of children only – those who are subject to a child protection plan and those who are classed as a looked after child by the local authority,” it says.

“The data stored will be child protection specific, and only shared between local authorities and health.”

NHS organisations will be able to access the database either using an integrated local system or via the summary care record.

“To use the integrated solution, healthcare providers need to make changes to their local systems; they will need to add two more messages: a query message to ask for the information; and a response message returned from the CP-IS application,” said the spokesperson.

If using the SCR application viewer, they would only need a smartcard.

“When the correct patient is identified, a page will display that contains their demographic details, and an alert tab will be shown on this page if the child is subject to a protection plan or has looked after child status,” said the spokesperson.