FGM Information Sharing (IS)
Introduction
Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) is an illegal, extremely harmful practice and a form of Child abuse and violence against women and girls. The Government is committed to preventing and ending this harmful practice which violates the rights of girls and women. The Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) in partnership with NHS England has launched a FGM Prevention Programme which aims to improve the NHS’ response to FGM, increase levels of safeguarding for girls at risk of FGM and provide better subsequent support and care for those that have undergone FGM.
As part of the FGM Prevention Programme, a national FGM Risk Indication System (FGM RIS) has been developed. This is a national IT service and forms part of the national Spine architecture. It allows FGM risk information for girls under 18 to be to created, deleted, stored and shared with relevant NHS healthcare professionals across departmental, organisational and geographical boundaries within England, supporting effective early intervention and ongoing safeguarding of girls potentially at risk of FGM. For more information.
The FGM RIS Interoperability has been through two iterations:
- FGM RIS v1.0 - this is currently supported in live use for phase 1 query with an agreed supplier set ONLY. This specification is deprecated for further development. Further information about this standard can be found on NHS Digital FGM RIS landing page and here: https://data.developer.nhs.uk/fhir/fgm/Chapter.1.About/index.html
- FGM RIS v2.0 - this is now supported for all suppliers for query, create and delete with an uplift to the query requirements to support local caching. Information can be found here https://developer.nhs.uk/apis/fgm-v2/
The FGM RIS interoperability requirements should not be confused with the FGM Enhanced Dataset that requires organisations to record, collect and return detailed information about individual Patients affected by FGM.
For more information on this dataset see http://content.digital.nhs.uk/isce/publication/scci2026.
The data flow diagram below is an example of how an FGM Risk Indicator may be set.
Compliance and Assurance
To gain access to FGM suppliers follow the Common Assurance Process (CAP). CAP is an end-to-end assurance process, which involves a tailored (CAP) approach being developed which states what deliverable and activities are conducted.
Compliance is established through the end-to-end assurance process.
For advice and support from the NHS Business Partners programme, please contact businesspartners@nhs.net or visit https://digital.nhs.uk/services/nhs-business-partners
Requirements
Req Id | Requirement Text | Level |
|---|---|---|
| FGMRIS-01 | Solutions which offer the Recording Consultations capability will achieve compliance with FGM RIS API version 2.0 | MUST |
Documentation
The API Hub on the NHS Developer Network contains the latest documentation for FGM RIS API version 2.0.
The latest Requirements Specification document is version 2.1 and is downloadable from this page in the above site. (The embedded documents have been versioned independently of the API specification)
SCCI2112 - FGM RIS Local System Integration Information Standard contains information about the Information Standards Notice.
Note: the documents downloadable in the Releases section apply to FGM RIS v1.0 only.