NHS Digital SCP: electronic notice forms service

NHS Digital — at the time of engagement, the Health and Social Care Information Centre (HSCIC) — commissioned PretaGov to build the electronic forms infrastructure underpinning a national NHS notice-and-pathway process. The system processes Assessment, Withdrawal and Discharge notices used by clinicians and administrators across England.

Background

The brief came under HSCIC procurement HCON00876: a Statement of Requirement for a forms-generator service that could be deployed inside HSCIC's infrastructure, meet government-grade security standards, and handle the workflow patterns of NHS notice processes without requiring per-form custom code.

The previous arrangement relied on Word and PDF forms distributed by email and filed by hand. That worked while volumes were small but didn't scale, didn't audit, and didn't integrate with downstream NHS systems.

Solution

We delivered an electronic forms platform that handled the three core notice types (Assessment, Withdrawal, Discharge) with a workflow appropriate to each — including the multi-stage approvals and the data-capture rules NHS Digital required. The system was independently security-tested by an external IA assessor (report IA12324-RPT-01) prior to production deployment.

Moving a record between two health systems

The notices are the handover itself. A clinician works through an assessment for a patient about to leave hospital; the answers become an Assessment Notice in HL7 CDA, the international format for exchanging clinical documents, which travels to the receiving council's social care team over MESH, the NHS secure transfer service. When the patient is discharged, the discharge notice follows the same path, its fields pre-filled from the assessment.

That is what removes the fax and the re-keying: the receiving system reads a structured clinical document rather than a scan of somebody’s handwriting. Field-to-format mapping lives in the platform’s scripting layer, so a change to the notice does not require a release.

In 2018 we delivered the GDPR change-control work needed to keep the system compliant with the new data-protection regime, including auditing of personal data flows, retention controls, and updates to the subject-rights handling. The platform remained in service through subsequent NHS Digital reorganisations.

What this work tells you about us

Forms infrastructure is unglamorous and frequently underestimated. Done well, it removes weeks of manual handling from clinical and administrative processes. Done badly, it becomes a permanent source of friction. The NHS Digital engagement is a representative example of what we ship for forms-heavy government workflow: agnostic to specific forms, security-tested for production NHS use, designed for evolution rather than single-shot delivery.

What this involved

  • Assessment and discharge notices for the NHS hospital-to-social-care handover, replacing handwritten forms sent by fax

  • Notices structured to HL7 CDA — the international format for exchanging clinical documents — and carried to councils over MESH, the NHS secure transfer service

  • Field-to-format mapping held in the platform’s scripting layer, so changing a notice does not require a software release

  • Patient data under NHS privacy obligations: the 2018 GDPR change control audited personal data flows, set retention controls and updated subject-rights handling

  • UK-hosted at OFFICIAL, mapped to IL2/IL3, in ISO 27001 certified Tier 3 data centres, and independently security-tested before production

  • Built to the GDS Service Design Manual — works without JavaScript, tested to WCAG 2.0 AA