Surrey switches on child health system for 440,000 children

Health information for 440,000 children across Surrey is now being held on a single, region-wide information system, in an initiative designed to ensure clinicians have access to data in one place.

CSH Surrey, which provides community health services for adults, children and their families in Surrey, has successfully gone live with the CarePlus child health system from System C.

The system will be used by more than 500 staff across three NHS providers, who together provide children’s community NHS services through Children and Family Health Surrey.

The go-live involved combining legacy child health systems into a single unified system spanning the service’s three NHS providers – CSH Surrey, First Community Health and Care, and Surrey and Borders NHS Partnership Trust – in addition to six clinical commissioning groups (CCGs).

The “complex” programme, which System C said was delivered “on time and to a tight three-month schedule of work”, also included links to the National Event Management Service (NEMS) launched by NHS England and NHS Digital last year.

Keith Woollard, director of digital services, CSH Surrey, said: “I’m very pleased with the roll out of a single child health record for the area. We’ve managed to achieve a very smooth transition in a short timescale and we’re already seeing the benefits of providing care professionals with a single health record.”

Surrey’s new CarePlus is just one of three child health systems nationally to link to NEMS, which enables child health information to be available digitally to health professionals and parents at the point of care.

The NEMS interface shares event alerts with care professionals on change of address, change of GP practice, birth notification and death notification, and screening events for neonatal blood spots, hearing and newborn infant physical examination.

As well as connecting to NEMS via FHIR messaging standards, the Surrey child health information system also interacts with the Personal Demographic Service (PDS) and with health intelligence for GP immunisations.

As such, the CarePlus system will give easy access to information to support pre-school and school health programmes of care such as birth details, immunisations and screening records for all children in Surrey.

Markus Bolton, joint chief executive System C, said: “This is a significant achievement by CSH Surrey. A key challenge with this implementation was the successful migration of data from two legacy instances of RiO, plus the integration with other systems and services.

“It was a complex deployment which required strong collaboration and teamwork. CSH Surrey is a great partner to work with – congratulations to everyone involved.”

System C’s CarePlus software is also in use across South Gloucester and the Isles of Scilly in south west England, where it went live in late 2018, as well as the West Midlands.