Introduction
All organisations that require connectivity to the Health & Social Care Network (HSCN) must complete and submit a Connection Agreement to NHS England. Signing this agreement will mean that your organisation is ready to be connected to the HSCN once you’ve identified a supplier.
Full published guidance from NHS England can be found here. This document contains sections from NHS guidance, either replicated verbatim or slightly adjusted for clarity.
You can complete a Connection Agreement at any point before you connect to HSCN. NHS England advises that you do this as soon as possible to make sure you do not face any connection delays.
In this guide, we’ll take you through the necessary steps to obtain your Connection Agreement.
Compliance Steps
Step 1: Check the HSCN statement
To access and sign the HSCN Connection Agreement, a representative from your organisation must first confirm that your intended use for HSCN aligns with this statement:
- “Connection to the HSCN is provided based on the business need to share information within the health and social care community. This means that HSCN is available to any organisation where the purpose of its connection to HSCN is the delivery, facilitation, or support of health and/or social care in England.”
Essentially, the Connection Agreement is a promise that you will use the HSCN for the purpose it was intended, and will follow the information governance standards and data security best practice set out in the Data Security Protection Toolkit (DSPT).
Step 2: Check for an existing Connection Agreement
Before submitting for a Connection Agreement, you should check whether your organisation already has one.
If your organisation already has a valid Connection Agreement in place, you do not need to follow the following steps and can proceed to select an HSCN connectivity supplier.
- You only need one signed Connection Agreement for your organisation even if you are establishing multiple HSCN connections.
- You can search your organisation here to check whether you already have an HSCN Connection agreement in place: https://crm.digital.nhs.uk/hscnconnectionagreementsearch/
Enter the CAPTCHA information and then search your organisation by ODS code or name.
Step 3: Find or create your ODS Code
If you already know your ODS code, you can skip this step.
- An ODS code (also called an Organisation code) is a unique code created by the Organisation Data Service within NHS England, and used to identify organisations across health and social care. An ODS code is needed to access a range of NHS England services including the HSCN.
- It is likely that you already have an ODS code, especially if you work in a public health organisation.
- To find it, you can search here: https://odsportal.digital.nhs.uk/Organisation/Search
- If you can’t find your ODS code(s), or you know that you don’t have one, this means you don’t currently exist on the Care Quality Commission (CQC) database. You’ll need to contact the Data Security & Protection Toolkit (DSPT) helpdesk to register yourself. To do this, email ssd.nationalservicedesk@nhs.net or call 0300 303 5035.
- Once the DSPT team have created your organisation on their database, your details will flow through to ODS and be published as part of the social care files used across the NHS.
- If you locate your organisation and some of the details are incorrect, email the DSPT helpdesk on ssd.nationalservicedesk@nhs.net or call 0300 303 5035. They will correct the information for you.
Search for your organisation by name, type or postcode
Step 4: Signing the Connection Agreement
The Connection Agreement can be signed online using the HSCN Portal. To register for an account, please complete the self service registration process here: https://crm.digital.nhs.uk/selfservice/
- You will need to know your Organisation Data Service (ODS) code (see step 3) and the contact details of the person who will sign the Connection Agreement.
- When you’ve signed the Connection Agreement online you’ll receive an automated confirmation email with a copy of your signed Connection Agreement attached.
- The HSCN Authority (NHS England) has a policy which governs access to HSCN. Your organisation’s compliance with this policy is automatically determined during the course of the self-service registration process.
- You must confirm that you agree with the “Acceptable Use” statement and specify, at a high level, what sorts of services your organisation offers. Depending on the information which you submit you will either be automatically approved or your application to sign an HSCN Connection Agreement (and thereby gain access to HSCN) will be paused pending manual approval by the HSCN Authority.
Register for the HSCN portal and follow the steps
Step 5: Information Governance and Data Security
The Information Governance Toolkit (IGT) has been replaced by the Data Security and Protection Toolkit (DSPT).
- It is not necessary to complete a Data Security and Protection Toolkit (DSPT) assessment in order to gain access to HSCN. However, all organisations that have or require access to NHS patient data and systems must use this toolkit to provide assurance that they are practising good data security and that personal information is handled correctly.
- This means that having an HSCN connection does not automatically grant your organisation access to the systems and services available on it. A DSPT assessment is still required to access NHS England’s national applications (such as the NHS e-Referral Service (ERS), Personal Demographics Service (PDS) and Secondary Uses Service (SUS)). Other suppliers may have alternative prerequisites for access to their systems such as tokens or smartcards or a sponsor.
More information about the systems and services provided by NHS England can be found on this systems and services page.
Step 5: Submission
When you have completed and submitted the Connection Agreement online (see step 4), you’ll receive an automated confirmation email with a copy of your signed Connection Agreement attached.
What next?
The time taken to obtain your CA is dependent on NHS England’s capacity to countersign it. We recommend starting the process as soon as possible, to avoid any risk of delay. Once everything is in place, the connection can be set up at a pace that suits you.
