PSNC guidance available on 'Data Security & Protection Toolkit'

The Pharmaceutical Services Negotiating Committee (PSNC) has published new guidance to help community pharmacy contractors to complete the 2021/22 Data Security and Protection Toolkit.

The Toolkit is used to make a pharmacy’s information governance (IG) declaration and must be completed by 30th June 2022.

PSNC has collaborated with NHS Digital to keep the workload associated with Toolkit completion manageable whilst maintaining the appropriate data security protections. Key differences in this year’s Toolkit include:

• The ‘tool tips’ contain pharmacy specific information for the first time;
• layout improvements;
• new mandatory questions;
• improvements to the question wording; and
• the Toolkit now displays the answers submitted by the pharmacy in the previous submission for many questions, allowing contractors to simply confirm the information remains accurate and adjust this if necessary.

“The NHS Parent Organisation Code (POC) headquarters (HQ) batch submission feature has also been improved to enable contractors that own three or more pharmacies to complete a single submission for all their premises,” said PSNC.

As with last year, most contractors should have access to information to help them answer the more technical questions contained within the Toolkit. Contractors who have refreshed and updated their templates in PSNC’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) Workbook, should once again confirm this on the Toolkit’s Organisation Profile webpage as doing so will mean that around half of the Toolkit questions will be auto-completed.

PSNC also recommend that contractors with three or more pharmacies check that the list of pharmacies associated with their NHS POC code remains correct so that any issues can be rectified as soon as possible.

The committee will also be holding a webinar on Tuesday 24th May at 7.00pm to help community pharmacy contractors with completing the Data Security and Protection Toolkit for 2021/22.

During the webinar, which will last for approximately 45 minutes, representatives from PSNC and NHS Digital will discuss the Toolkit questions, talk delegates through the available guidance materials and answer questions about making the declaration.