Guidance on managing IT issues

Community Pharmacy England regularly receives queries or requests for advice about system-specific IT issues, and we have recently updated our factsheet to support pharmacy owners and their teams.

Although we can assist with service or payment-related processes, addressing technical issues falls outside of our remit and you should contact your IT system supplier or IT support provider for help. Where necessary, your supplier can escalate any issues that are outside of their control to the NHS National Service Desk and NHS IT live services so that issues are properly raised, recorded and resolved.

The updated factsheet outlines these top tips and key points:

• Report issues to suppliers: Pharmacy teams should report any NHS IT, CPCF IT, or EPS issues to their pharmacy system suppliers by email or phone. It’s important to ask for a helpdesk reference for each issue to track progress and to allow you to escalate your issue if needed.
• Escalation routes: If the supplier cannot resolve the issue because it is outside their control (e.g. it relates to an issue with a GP system or national NHS IT infrastructure), they should escalate the matter to the NHS National Service Desk (NSD) to coordinate resolution.
• Follow-up: Suppliers should report progress to the pharmacy and provide the NSD national incident number (NIN).
• Use email to raise issues and to provide an audit trail: It’s recommended you use email rather than phone calls to raise issues as this will provide an auditable trail where escalation is required.
• Additional support and processes: For severe clinical, information governance and security issues impacting multiple pharmacies, pharmacies can ask their PMR supplier to escalate the issue to NHS Service Bridge. The factsheet states how pharmacy team members with NHSmail can also register to use the NSD Customer Portal to report issues directly, where the NHS IT issue is outside the supplier’s control or the supplier is not resolving them. The portal includes an NHS IT service status checker that can be accessed without Smartcard usage (but NHSmail is required).

View the Escalating NHS IT service issues one-page factsheet.