Plain-English explanations of the technical terms and legislation used in this document.
- Business continuity plan (BCP)
- The documented arrangements for keeping a service running, or safely pausing it, during a disruption and for getting back to normal afterwards.
- Captured number
- The patient's contact telephone number, taken at booking and confirmed at the start of a consultation, so the clinician can ring them back if the technology fails.
- Care Quality Commission (CQC)
- The independent regulator of health and social care services in England.
- Cold chain
- Keeping vaccines and certain medicines within a safe temperature range from delivery to use.
- Contemporaneous notes
- Notes written at the time of, or immediately after, an event so the record is accurate and reliable.
- Critical system
- Any technology the service cannot safely deliver, record or support care without, such as the consultation platform, clinical record system, telephony or internet connection.
- Cyber attack
- A deliberate attempt to damage, disrupt or gain unauthorised access to computer systems or data.
- Data Protection Act 2018
- The UK law that sits alongside the UK General Data Protection Regulation and governs how personal information must be handled.
- Data Security and Protection Toolkit
- An online self-assessment tool that lets health and care organisations show they handle personal information safely and meet data-security standards.
- Dependency
- A service or component that a critical system needs in order to work, such as internet connectivity, electrical power or a cloud-hosting provider.
- Duty of candour
- The legal duty to be open and honest with a person and their family when something goes wrong with their care.
- E-prescribing
- Issuing and sending prescriptions electronically rather than on paper.
- General practitioner (GP)
- A doctor who provides general medical care in the community and is usually a patient's first point of contact.
- Holding message
- A pre-agreed message (for example on the website, telephone or by text) that tells patients what is happening and what to do during a disruption.
- Hosting provider
- The company whose servers and data centres run the service's online systems and store its data.
- Incident log
- A running record of what happened during an incident, including times, systems affected, suspected cause and the actions taken.
- Information Commissioner's Office (ICO)
- The UK regulator responsible for upholding data-protection and information rights.
- Information governance
- The framework for handling people's personal and health information legally, securely and appropriately.
- Maximum tolerable downtime (MTD)
- The longest a critical system can be unavailable before the impact on patients or the organisation becomes unacceptable.
- Modality
- The means by which a consultation is carried out, for example video, telephone or secure messaging.
- Near miss
- An event that could have caused harm but did not, by chance or because it was caught in time.
- Notifiable personal data breach
- A security incident affecting personal data that the law requires be reported to the Information Commissioner's Office, usually within a short, fixed time.
- Outage
- A period during which a critical system, or the whole service, is unavailable or working poorly.
- Personal data breach
- A security failure that leads to personal information being lost, destroyed, altered, disclosed or accessed without authorisation.
- Recovery point objective (RPO)
- The most data, measured as a length of time, the service can afford to lose - in effect, how recent the last usable backup must be.
- Recovery time objective (RTO)
- The target time within which a critical system should be restored, or an alternative put in place, after a failure.
- Regulated activity
- A type of care or treatment the law requires a provider to register with the regulator to deliver.
- Registered manager
- The person registered with the regulator as responsible for the day-to-day running of a service.
- Safety-netting
- Clear advice to a patient on what to look out for and how to get urgent help if their condition changes or worsens.
- Service-level agreement (SLA)
- The agreed standard of service from a supplier, including target times to respond to and fix faults and outages.
- Single assessment framework
- The structure the regulator uses to judge a service, built around quality statements and five key questions (safe, effective, caring, responsive, well-led).
- Standard Operating Procedure (SOP)
- A written, step-by-step instruction setting out how a particular task or process must be carried out consistently.
- Telephony
- The telephone system the service uses to make and receive calls, which may run over the internet.
- Triage
- Sorting patients by how urgent their clinical need is, so the most urgent are dealt with first.
- UK General Data Protection Regulation (UK GDPR)
- The UK's main data-protection law governing how personal information is collected and used.
- Voice-over-internet (VoIP)
- Technology that carries telephone calls over an internet connection instead of a traditional phone line.