The 'spine' is the colloquial name given to the national database of key information about patients' health and care. It forms the core of the NHS Care Records Service. It also supports other key elements of the national programme for IT (NPfIT), such as choose and book, the electronic prescriptions service, the summary care record and 'GP to GP' record transfer, each of them using the spine's messaging functionality as part of their own services.
Reports of service incidents for investigation fall into five levels of severity, ranging from those which have a significant adverse impact on the provision of the service (severity 1), to those comprising mere cosmetic flaws, for example on-screen misalignment of data (severity 5). They may involve intermittent failures or be unnoticed by the user since other, associated application functionality is unaffected. Similarly, the service incidents that do occur do not usually affect all users and may be quite localised.
A breakdown of reported incidents by date and whether these were a result of a national service incident or were as a result of local circumstances, together with the period of service interruption, could be provided only at disproportionate cost. There is no evidence of any service incident having had a material impact on the quality of patient care.
The service availability levels required under the spine contract are exceptionally demanding compared with those for information technology systems that preceded NPfiT. Since the first spine applications went live in July 2004, overall service availability has typically been continuously either at 100 per cent, or very close to 100 per cent, across the whole range of spine services. Details of service availability for spine services, measured against contracted target availability, is routinely published, and updated weekly, on the NHS Connecting for Health website at:
www.connectingforhealth.nhs.uk/newsroom/statistics/availability/ncrs_stats.