NHS 'numbers for babies' goes live

A revolutionary computerised 'numbers for babies' system went live across the NHS at midnight on 29 October, marking a significant step towards the goal of electronic patient records.

Starting today, all babies born in England and Wales will be issued with a unique NHS number at birth, helping to ensure that personal records are consistent and universally available to relevant NHS staff from day one.

Previously babies had to wait until their civil registration at the Registrar of Births and Deaths before receiving their NHS number, often as long as six weeks after birth.

During that time, the baby may have undergone tests and treatment in different locations, and may possibly have changed name or address.

The NHS number will now be issued by midwives though a new computerised Central Issue System (CIS), developed and supported by BT's systems integration arm Syntegra in a deal worth around £2m over eight years.

The CIS is accessed via an online TCP/IP transaction using HTTP and Secure Socket Layer for encryption through existing maternity systems over the NHSnet secure wide area network.

Martin Weller, communications manager at the NHS Information Authority, said: "The new system marks an important advance in NHS administration.

"It provides additional safeguards in the key early stages of a child's life and ensures that a comprehensive health record is available wherever and whenever it is needed."

The NHS number provides a common link between a patient's records across the NHS, both electronic and manual, and is the cornerstone of the move towards electronic health records.

By 31 March next year, all electronic communications about patients must include their NHS number. Trusts will also need to purchase full clinical information systems to deliver Level 3 Electronic Patient Records by 2005.

The NHS number is expected to improve the efficiency of research, and healthcare providers will also be able to speed up processes such as invitations for screening and reporting screening results by using it to identify patients and records accurately.

Those maternity departments without an NN4B-compliant system by 28 June were provided with an Interim NHS Numbering System (INNS) from Syntegra free of charge.

Currently, only two-thirds of the 243 maternity units in England and Wales have systems capable of issuing NHS numbers.

"Many units have needed to embrace IT for the first time. Some sites are running INNS in parallel with their existing systems for a short period of time," said Weller.

"Most issues revolve around the varying technical infrastructure set-ups implemented at different sites.

"Differing versions of operating systems, firewalls, proxy servers and email clients provided a significant challenge which seems to have been overcome."

In the event of the CIS becoming unavailable, the service will switch immediately to a full 24/7 disaster recovery system, which should be totally transparent to NHS Trusts and their users.