Data Security & Protection Toolkit: 2024 Community Pharmacy England guidance available
Community Pharmacy England has published new guidance to help community pharmacy owners complete the latest Data Security and Protection Toolkit. The Toolkit is used to make a pharmacy’s information governance (IG) declaration and must be completed by Sunday 30th June 2024.
Community Pharmacy England has collaborated with the NHS DSPTK team to keep the workload associated with Toolkit completion manageable whilst maintaining the appropriate data security protections.
Key differences in this year’s Toolkit include:
- Improvements to the Toolkit’s layout.
- Improvements to the question wording and pharmacy-specific tips.
- The Toolkit displays the answers submitted by the pharmacy in the previous submission for various questions, allowing pharmacy teams to simply confirm that the information remains accurate and adjust this if necessary.
The NHS Parent Organisation Code (POC) headquarters (HQ) batch submission feature also continues to enable pharmacy owners (that own three or more pharmacies) to complete a single submission for all their premises.
Similar to last year, most pharmacy teams should have access to information to help them answer the more technical questions in the Toolkit. Pharmacy teams who have refreshed and updated their templates in Community Pharmacy England’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) Workbook will be able to meet the criteria for completing around half of the Toolkit questions. They can simply type or paste ‘see GDPR WB’ into those questions.
We have published our guidance materials as soon as possible and strongly encourage pharmacy teams to consider this annual requirement in their workload planning.
Additionally, we also recommend that pharmacy owners with three or more pharmacies check the list of pharmacies associated with their NHS POC code to ensure its accuracy, allowing any issues to be rectified promptly. For more information, please refer to our batch submission guidance below.
Community Pharmacy England guidance
- Toolkit completion: Overview: Five steps for completing the Data Security and Protection Toolkit 2024– This is a step-by-step guide to completing the Toolkit and contains references to other useful materials.
- Toolkit completion: Question-by-question guidance (mandatory questions)– This guidance has been designed to help pharmacy teams complete the mandatory questions within the Toolkit.
- Toolkit completion: Using the NHS Parent Org Code (HQ) batch submission (for pharmacy owners with three or more pharmacies)
Next steps
We recommend that you log in to the Toolkit as soon as possible and read our guidance documents, starting with the Toolkit completion: Overview: Five steps guide. If time allows, pharmacy teams should begin filling in the Toolkit.
Please note that all the questions marked mandatory in the Toolkit must be completed as part of a pharmacy’s NHS Terms of Service to meet the minimum IG requirements.
Also, please note that PMR suppliers may soon provide additional guidance to help pharmacy teams with completing the updated technical questions in the 2024 Toolkit.
