Bury, Oldham, Rochdale and Trafford added to child health system

Children’s health records from across Bury, Oldham, Rochdale and Trafford have been integrated onto a shared health information system.

The four boroughs have joined the Greater Manchester CarePlus system which is powered by System C. The go-live means nine of the ten CCG areas in Greater Manchester are now using the system for a unified source of information whilst caring for and safeguarding child residents.

The solution integrates with various systems and services and supports the child health service with birth registrations, screening and immunisation programmes, and the Healthy Child Programme.

More than 491,000 children’s records from the legacy PARIS system had to to be migrated to the new system. The process also included merging more than 229,000 records where children were registered on both PARIS and CarePlus and changing the data from the PARIS file formats to the CarePlus upload formats.

Paula Markham, head of operational informatics at the Northern Care Alliance NHS Group said: “Bringing Bury, Oldham, Rochdale and Trafford on board the Greater Manchester child health information system and creating a larger footprint with a single system will strengthen the service for children and parents as well as better supporting our colleagues across the regions.

“We are using CarePlus to provide care professionals with an accurate, comprehensive and up to date electronic record for every child in the areas, at the point of care, by integrating information from maternity providers, blood spot screening labs, health visitor teams and newborn hearing programme providers.”

Extending the Greater Manchester child health system to Bury, Oldham, Rochdale and Trafford has increased the total number of children’s records managed by the CarePlus system across the region to 1,366,071. Similar systems have been set up across Cheshire and Surrey.

Markus Bolton, joint chief executive of System C, added: “The Northern Care Alliance and the System C CarePlus team have worked well together to keep this project on track through the challenging national circumstances.

“The project was time-critical as the PARIS system was being turned off at the end of 2020 and Covid-19 lockdown restrictions added further challenges, including having to remain off-site. It’s always great to see successful programmes like this one, joining up health and care and improving services for populations, but particularly so under the current conditions.”

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