Reminder: Data Security Toolkit new guidance available (30th June deadline approaches)

Community Pharmacy England has published new guidance to help pharmacy owners (our members) to complete the 2022/23 Data Security and Protection Toolkit (DSPTK). The Toolkit is used to make a pharmacy’s information governance (IG) declaration and the deadline is Friday 30th June 2023.

We 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; and
• the Toolkit displays the answers submitted by the pharmacy in the previous submission for various questions, allowing pharmacy owners 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 to allow pharmacy owners (that own three or more pharmacies) to complete a single submission for all their premises.

As with last year, the majority of pharmacy owners should have access to information to help them answer the more technical questions contained within the Toolkit. Those who have refreshed and updated their templates in our General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) Workbook, will be able to meet the criteria for completing around half of the Toolkit questions, and should type or paste ‘see GDPR WB’ into those questions.

We published our guidance materials in January to allow workload planning.

Pharmacy owners with three or more pharmacies may check that the list of pharmacies associated with their NHS POC code is still correct so that any issues can be rectified as soon as possible. See our batch submission guidance (below) for more information.

Community Pharmacy England guidance

We have published the following guidance documents to support our members:

• Toolkit completion: Overview: Five steps for completing the Data Security and Protection Toolkit 2022/23– 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 owners 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)

On-demand webinar

Earlier this year we held a workshop on the Toolkit for members, which is available to view on-demand, more than nine in ten said they would recommend the webinar to others, with 100% saying that they found it useful.

During the webinar, representatives from Community Pharmacy England and the Toolkit team provided guidance on completing the Toolkit questions, gave a demonstration of how to use and navigate the Toolkit, and answered viewers’ questions on how to make the data security declaration.

Click here to view an on-demand version of the webinar.

Next steps

We recommend that members log in to the Toolkit and read our guidance documents – starting with the Toolkit completion: Overview: Five steps guide. If time allows, we advise members begin filling in the Toolkit well ahead of the deadline.

Please also note that PMR suppliers may soon provide additional guidance to help with completing the updated technical questions in the 2022/23 Toolkit.