NHS Number limitations confirmed

Tags: Community Informing Healthcare NHS Number NPSA

17 Sep 2009

The National Patient Safety Agency has confirmed that community pharmacists, community nurses and other groups of NHS workers will be unable to meet the national requirement to use the NHS Number from the end of this week.

The NPSA said it accepted that dentists, optometrists, community pharmacists, community nurses and ambulance staff in England would not be able to comply with all the recommendations of the NHS Number Safer Practice Notice “because all or most will not be able to access or search for NHS Numbers."

The agency said affected NHS staff could comply with some of the recommendations in the Safer Practice Notice and that it wanted them to prepare for the time when they would have access to NHS Numbers.

A 'clarification statement' from the NPSA, NHS Connecting for Health and Informing Healthcare says that affected groups should use the NHS Number where it is available in correspondence with patients.

It also says they should help patients to find out more about their NHS Number, for example by displaying the CfH leaflet on the NHS Number.

The guidance also says that when a health organisation receives correspondence without an NHS Number from a healthcare organisation that can access or search for the NHS Number, it should request the NHS Number from the sending organisation.

The Safer Practice Notice issued by the NPSA in September 2008 requires all health organisations in England and Wales providing primary, secondary and other types of care to use the NHS Number as the national identifier for all NHS patients from 18 September 2009.

Last month, EHI Primary Care reported that the NPSA was expected to confirm the exemption from full compliance because of current lack of access to the Personal Demographics Service or Welsh Demographics Service for some groups of users.

Fiona Barr

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Reader's Comments

Common sense

18 Sep 09 20:09

Quoting a common number is a good idea, but the mandate was barking because only GPs have a number allocated to all of their patients realtime, so pleased to see this.

NHS Hospitals also will struggle, because not all patients who pitch up will be registered with a GP, and online live access was canned by CfH.

So the original mandate to them too should just have been an exhortation to use the number, and to ask for it when missing.

Summaryt Care Record Application

22 Sep 09 09:09

NHS CFH has (almost) closed access to the NHS Strategic Tracing Service (NSTS) however it's provided a worthy replacement.

The Summary Care Record application gives online access to patient demographics information in hospitals and anywhere else that needs it. You do need N3, a smartcard and an appropriate role to access it though.

As I understand it hospital trusts now have to wrestle with the following issues:

- They cannot allocate NHS Numbers for new patients without an LSP PAS. - The data quality (and rate of records with NHS Numbers) is very poor from dental and optician referrals.

I think the latter case means that despite the NPSA clarifying the boundaries of the safer practice notice the NHS is still going to have to look at the use of the NHS Number across the board.