The purpose of this site is to provide a consolidated set of technology guidelines for all NHS organisations and for suppliers, vendors, and OEM's supplying technology to the NHS. It may be a future delivery to include standards and/or formal requirements as well.
These guidelines will be owned and governed not just by NHS England but by the NHS Technology Forum, consisting of digital and technology leads from across the NHS.
These guidelines will signpost to NHS and UK Government legislation, policies, and standards as needed and they aim to draw together the excellent work done elsewhere into a single, discoverable site.
The UK Government Tech Vision - “Standards that meet user needs: we must be clear how these standards address the user needs of people who use health and care services, carers and families, as well as care professionals and commissioners.”
The NHS Long Term Plan - “Set standards that keep information secure and make sure NHS IT systems talk to each other to provide health and care staff with complete access to joined up patient records.”
Underpinning these guidelines are the UK Government Service Standard which covers 14 topics:
- Understand users and their needs
- Solve a whole problem for users
- Provide a joined up experience across all channels
- Make the service simple to use
- Make sure everyone can use the service
- Have a multidisciplinary team
- Use agile ways of working
- Iterate and improve frequently
- Create a secure service which protects users’ privacy
- Define what success looks like and publish performance data
- Choose the right tools and technology
- Make new source code open
- Use and contribute to open standards, common components and patterns
- Operate a reliable service
In addition, the NHS Service Standard adds some health-specific context and adds 3 extra topics:
- Support a culture of care
- Make your service clinically safe
- Make your service interoperable
These topics are critical to the delivery of good public services. All services should be assessed against them and the Technology Code of Practice (TCoP) is a set of criteria that help organisations in their assessments.
TCoP has 13 criteria and these must be assessed and met in order for the Central Digital & Data Office (CDDO) to release funds under the Cabinet Office Spend Controls process.
- Define user needs
- Make things accessible and inclusive
- Be open and use open source
- Make use of open standards
- Use cloud first
- Make things secure
- Make privacy integral
- Share, reuse and collaborate
- Integrate and adapt technology
- Make better use of data
- Define your purchasing strategy
- Make your technology sustainable
- Meet the Service Standard
This site is structured around these criteria so that organisations can more easily understand the relavent detailed legislation, policies, strategies, standards and guidelines.