The challenge
When routinely processing ‘movements in’ and ‘movements out’ of children and their families, there is a need to identify the relevant Child Health Information Service Office with which you (or your team) need to liaise, and the relevant office may be anywhere in the UK. Also, it may be necessary to provide information to other teams such as ‘Safeguarding’, ‘Paediatric Liaison’, ‘Looked After Children’ and ‘Adoptions’ and other partner organisations such as ‘Social Services’, Local Authorities and Police.
There are currently around 140 Child Health Offices around the UK and the details for these offices and their geographical coverage can (and do) change quite frequently. It isn’t necessarily the closest office that covers a particular location.
The solution
We provide a self-updating Directory that enables you to search for a town or village (with wildcard matching) and quickly identify the responsible CHIS Office.
We are actively tracking over 28,000 cities, towns and villages and, for each, the Office details include Organisation Name, Postal Address, Telephone numbers, Email Addresses, Systems Used, Preferred Record Formats, Geographical Locations Covered, Ages Covered, etc.
We continuously update the Directory with any changes that are either;
- notified to us directly
- notified by third parties (there are several ‘scouts’ in place)
- proactively discovered by periodic checks with each office
We stress that ALL Child Health Offices across the UK are listed and maintained – not just those of subscribers.
The Directory now updates itself automatically each time you open it. This means that you can always be sure that you’re working with the latest information. You can also conveniently generate address labels if you need to send paper records to a CHIS Office.
The Directory will still work quite happily in off-line mode so don’t worry if your web connection is down for the day or you need to work on the move.
NEW! – Premium Edition
In the Summer of 2021 we launched our Premium Edition Directory.
This edition searches by postcode (rather than towns and villages) meaning that you get 100% coverage and a fast and accurate match with precisely the correct Office. It also features a useful link to check your postcode in Google Maps™
This Directory also provides additional office details including associated 0-19 Services and Safeguarding contacts.
Future developments
The Directory information is held as a structured data-set with a full change-history log and referential data-integrity.
One major Child Health System vendor already subscribes to a data feed and has integrated this information into their system. Their users now benefit from integral functionality to quickly search for offices, print labels, generate letters and record the movement of patient notes.
We also track a lot of detail in the background such as geographics and Child Population counts.
We are always exploring opportunities for subscribers to gain even greater benefit from this information.
Ordering
We have been managing and publishing the CHIS Directory since 2012 and it is now widely used and trusted by over 100 NHS Organisations and partners across the UK.
The service offered is a one year subscription to the CHIS Directory including all updates and technical support. The subscription commences at the date of initial order and is priced based on the size of your organisation. There’s no obligation or commitment for subscribers to renew.
If you interested in subscribing to the directory then simply let us know by email to chdirectory@scopetrack.co.uk