Stakeholder briefing June 2025

A system that transforms the way information is shared among health and care organisations in Devon and Cornwall. The Devon and Cornwall Care Record (DCCR) enables authorised health and care staff to see details held by a wide range of providers across Devon, Cornwall and the Isle of Scilly in a single record. It gives professionals a more complete view of a patient’s history and is part of a national programme.

Electronic treatment escalation plan (eTEP)

There are now over 25,000 eTEPs in the DCCR system, with an average of 1,500 views per week. There have been over 72,000 views since the eTEP system went live. This is great progress and thanks to everybody who has been involved.

We are continuing to engage with the GP practices who have yet to sign up.

Torbay and South Devon NHS Foundation Trust is not yet live but have made progress by enabling Launch in Context to their internal Intersystems Healthshare portal and have identified a project manager to lead the rollout, although no firm timescales are available at this time.

Royal Devon University Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust is continuing work on integration with EPIC to allow EPIC users to see the resuscitation status from the clinical dashboard. This is planned for completion in July 2025.

Royal Cornwall Hospitals NHS Trust is implementing a similar solution for Oracle Millenium and this is in the late stages of testing – although the go-live for Millennium is still to be confirmed.

Several improvements have been implemented, and the printed version now includes the date of birth so that the person can be verified using three items of information.

The children’s version is also now enabled, but this is subject to a formal rollout and information will be provided separately. This version is adaptive, and the questions presented are related to the patient’s age, with all transitions recorded in the history. This is automated and users do not have to do determine which parts of a form are relevant to a particular age range, or which form to open.

For additional information on the eTEP project contact Jane Bullard at jane.bullard@nhs.net for Devon or Keziah Lagor keziah.lagor1@nhs.net for Cornwall.

National Care Record Service and ambulance access

The work to make the eTEP visible to the ambulance service is now complete and South Western Ambulance Service NHS Foundation Trust (SWASFT) will shortly be able to access any eTEP held in the DCCR via the National Care Record Service (NCRS).

This has been a significant undertaking, and there were delays caused by switching to the latest standard to future-proof the solution.

This is also Orion Health’s first deployment of the national record locator (NRL), and they are the first vendor in the country to go live as an NRL provider. It’s a major step forward in their national interoperability strategy.

It is anticipated that the rollout to ambulance crews will be in place by the end of this summer.

Stakeholder news

The DCCR system now has 318 partner organisations that have signed the Data Sharing Agreement. If you have individual users of the DSA, but who aren’t currently live, please get in touch with the DCCR who can assist with this.

We are continuing to engage with health and care organisations across Devon and Cornwall to demonstrate the benefits of the system which we are continuing to develop.

We have recently implemented four additional systems to provide Launch in Context access. This is for EPIC, Intersystem Healthshare, Adastra and Mosaic. Thank you to the technical teams at Orion, our partner organisations and the third parties for getting this over the line.

A full list of participating organisations can be found on our website.

Organisations not already signed up but wishing to participate should e-mail

d-icb.devonandcornwallcarerecord@nhs.net

NHS App

Phase 1 of the work to surface outpatient appointments from University Hospitals Plymouth NHS Trust (UHP) into the NHS App is now complete and live. Thank you to the staff at UHP, Orion and NHS England for working hard to make this happen.

Phase 2 will be to provide a mechanism to allow patients to request cancellations or to changes to appointments. This is in the early design phase, although funding for this has not yet been identified.

This is a significant development for both Orion and the DCCR as this paves the way for other information to be surfaced via the NHS App in the future.

Multi-factor authentication

NHS England has mandated that all staff with elevated system access use multi-factor authentication to access the system. This is the same mechanism used by many banks who send one-time passcodes, as well as NHS Mail for logins via a web-browser. This is now in place for the DCCR support team.

In a wider context, and considering several recent high-profile cyber-attacks, the DCCR will be widening the scope of this to include all partner organisations who access the DCCR via the portal using an internet connection. This will not apply to Launch in Context users, or partners that utilise the secure health and social care network (HSCN) connection.

This will also fix the issue for smaller organisations wishing to connect to the DCCR via the internet as this will remove the requirement to have a fixed IP address, which is not even possible with some internet service providers and increases costs for others.

We will be adopting the same approach as NHS Mail and users who do not already have the app installed for NHS Mail can download Microsoft Authenticator from the Apple iStore or the Google Play Store free of charge. The system also supports Google Authenticator and FreeOTP.

Partners impacted by this will be contacted individually with further information nearer the go-live, which is anticipated to be in late June or early July.

In the future this will also allow access to the DCCR from mobile devices. The DCCR portal is fully mobile adaptive, although there are some limitations as to what can be accessed. While in use in other countries, this is not currently being used in England, so the DCCR have made a request to Orion to allow us to implement this to allow peripatetic staff to access the system. We do not have any timescales for this at present, but we will be seeking partner organisations willing to be considered as early adopters.

Data protection

There is Role Based Access Control (RBAC) on the system – only appropriate health and care staff can access, there are robust governance processes (including legislation) to ensure privacy and security, and it is auditable.

Staff accessing systems are bound by employment contract and professional codes of conduct to ensure their access to data is necessary and appropriate.

The Devon and Cornwall Care Record does not use patient data for any other activities but to support the provision of safe and effective care. No personal identifiable data is shared with the Government, NHSE, non-health or care organisations for research or other purposes (unless specifically agreed to by the patient by giving consent).

Information about data protection for the DCCR is available here.

All partners who access the DCCR have signed a data sharing agreement and regular audits of DCCR use are carried out, with full visibility of which records users have accessed and what has been viewed.

As part of data protection guidance, users are being reminded that any inappropriate use, including viewing your own records (even to test the system), is a data breach and access may be revoked.

In addition, users accessing IT systems are bound by employment contract and professional codes of conduct to ensure their access to data is necessary and appropriate and all users are reminded that they have a professional responsibility to only ever view the records of people to whom their organisation is providing care.

Support

The dedicated DCCR Support Team are the main point of contact for day-to-day user support and queries. They work in conjunction with the supplier to keep things running smoothly. This six-person team currently handles an average of 600 user queries per month, but they are also responsible for testing upgrades to the system, facilitating the onboarding of new health and social care partners, and fulfilling data requests.

With an ever-increasing number of users and connected organisations, the demand on this small team is also increasing.  Please be mindful that responses from the support team may take longer than hoped.

If you have any feedback, complaints or compliments for the support team, you can contact the DCCR Support Team Leader, Hannah Sprague, on hannah.sprague@nhs.net.

For user support or general enquiries, you can reach the DCCR support team by e-mail, Monday to Friday between 8am to 5pm. rcht.dccrsupport@nhs.net

Training

We have recently moved our training material to eliminate the need for users to register for the Cornwall IT Services training site.

The material can now be found here: Training – Devon and Cornwall Care Record

Find out more about the DCCR

The programme team has also produced a range of resources to help staff and patients find out more about the DCCR. These include a:

• Quick guide to the DCCR – basic details about the programme.
• Patient communication toolkit – a suite of marketing materials to help organisations inform their patients and service users about the DCCR and its benefits. (download the quick guide and patent toolkit from the DCCR resource)
• Website – information about the DCCR for patients and health and care staff.
• Training website – supports staff of participating organisations in the use of the DCCR platform. The site includes user guides and short videos and can be found here.

Spread the word and get in touch

Please forward this email to any colleagues who might be interested in knowing more about the Devon and Cornwall Care Record. And if you have any questions about the programme or would like to find out more,
email the team on  d-icb.devonandcornwallcarerecord@nhs.net