Capacitee System - Business continuity guidance

Introduction

In the event that the Dental RMS system becomes unavailable for any unforeseen reason, there is the potential that it will affect the delivery of the MSE Dental urgent access service.

This document outlines the potential impact of a system outage and the mitigations all parties involved in the delivery of the urgent dental access service in MSE must undertake to minimise disruption and the risk to patients

Dental RMS Outage

The dental RMS is an incredibly reliable system with a consistent record of service availability of 99% spanning a 12-year period.

However, there is always the chance that an unforeseen issue, outside of the control of RMSL (who host the RMS) could occur and could lead to the system being unavailable.

In such a scenario, it is the ‘core system/ element’ of the urgent dentals access service, that would be affected, which is effectively the PReSS system.

The PReSS system being inaccessible by dental practice, means that the dental practices would not be able to view forthcoming appointments. Thus, for this service it would mean that NHS 111 and ED staff could be booking appointments for patients and the dental practice, due to the system being offline, is not receiving the notification to make them aware. Leading to patients presenting at the practice with no warning, and potentially when there is no appointment available, as the appointment slot, may have been utilised by a patient presenting for urgent dental care directly at the practice in the interim.

To mitigate the chances of the above occurring, in the event of a system outage the following should be enacted by the following parties.

Action all parties should undertake

RMSL

In the event that the Dental RMS is unavailable, the RMSL team will:

•       Notify Commissioners with immediate effect and also copy the same email notification to all dental practice email addresses that are participating in the delivery of the service.
•       Reach out the key IC24 contacts to inform them of the issue and request they enact BCP. The BCP, is that NHS 111 call handlers will stop immediately making direct bookings via the DAB on the system and instead revert back to providing patients with practice phone numbers, to enable them to call the practice directly and speak with them, to make an appointment directly (the historic process)
•       Reach out to ED’s to ask them to not make direct appointment bookings at this time, and again to revert to sharing practice phone numbers or reverting back to internal processes that predate this pilot service.

Commissioners

In the event that the Dental RMS is unavailable, the Commissioning team will:

•       Ensure they acknowledge receipt of the notification of the system outage.
•       Ensure they are available to assist RMSL in contacting all the above relevant parties.
•       Ensure they provide RMSL with the key / latest contacts details for the relevant parties mentioned above.
•       In the event that any party fails to respond and acknowledge the system notice via email, commissioners will contact none responders, via phone to ensure the message has been received and understood.

NHS 111

In the event that the Dental RMS is unavailable, the NHS 111 (IC24) team will:

•       Ensure they acknowledge receipt of the notification of the system outage.
•       Communicate to their team that the system is down and to not use the DAB and to instead revert back to historic processes of providing the practice phone number only.

Emergency Departments

In the event that the Dental RMS is unavailable, the ED team will:

•       Ensure they acknowledge receipt of the notification of the system outage.
•       Communicate to their team that the system is down and to not use that Capacitee booking system, and to instead revert back to historic processes of providing the practice phone number only or treating the patient within the hospital setting etc

Practices

In the event that the Dental RMS is unavailable, the Practices will:

•       Ensure they acknowledge receipt of the notification of the system outage.
•       It is the responsibility of the practice to maintain a local record of the daily appointment slots they have available each day, so should the system fail, they are able to use a manual process to book slots via the phone (as and when patients are deferred via NHS 111 and ED’s or contact directly).
•       To keep a manual record of all appointments that took place during this ‘downtime’ and once the system is up and running to add these appointments to the system retrospectively.

Restoration

When the RMS is ‘restored’ it is the responsibility or RMSL to contact all parties (the same process as the failure notification but effectively in reverse) to state the system has been stored and normal service may resume.

Likewise, it is the responsibility of all other parties to acknowledge receipt of this notification and confirmation that the normal service activity and arrangements have been resumed.

Contact details to be used to report a system failure to RMSL:

Contact details of all other parties to be notified of a system failure and system restoration.

*NOTE FOR RMSL STAFF ONLY:

More contacts details are available for all the above parties, should any of the above details be uncontactable, these are documented in the MSE Mobilisation plan. This should be utilised as the firs port of call and should there still be no response, revere back to commissioning teams