The final phase of a project to join up child health records across Cheshire and Merseyside has gone live.
Records from St Helens and Knowsley, Wirral and Warrington have been added to the CarePlus child health information system (CHIS) in a project led by NHS South Central and West Commissioning Support Unit (SCW CSU) and commissioned by NHS England.
Developed by health and social care software provider System C, it now covers 12 clinical commissioning groups, nine local authorities, 18 specialist, acute and community trusts, 392 general practices and six legacy child health information systems.
It enables care professionals to track children from childhood through to their transition to adult services.
The project was implemented in three phases: Cheshire migrated last year during the first Covid-19 lockdown and Liverpool and Sefton followed.
New function
Sue Trinder, child health information services director at SCW CSU, said an extra function has recently been added to the service, taking in data from the region’s Combined Intelligence for Population Health Action (CIPHA) data repository.
“Before this link, the child health admin and support team had to manually update data from paper forms and telephone/fax GP practices to validate the lists of children that required vaccination, resulting in extra work for both the team and the GP practices,” she said.
CarePlus is connected to the Spine and the National Events Management Service, making it possible for users to receive notifications of birth, change of addresses, change of GP practices, deaths and the three screening events (newborn and infant physical examination, hearing and bloodspot outcomes).
Image from iStock,Anna Stills
