NHS England provides information governance (IG) guidance to health and care organisations on its IG Portal. This guidance is approved by national stakeholders, including the National Data Guardian and the Information Commissioner’s Office. Existing guidance: • sharing for direct care statement: in 2023 there was a joint call to action from the National Data Guardian (Dr Nicola Byrne), the Information Commissioner (John Edwards) and the Chief Medical Officer for England at the time (Professor Chris Whitty) to all health and care staff. This encouraged frontline workers to share individuals’ health and care information more confidently across organisations and disciplines, to provide them with the best possible care Planned guidance: • model data-sharing agreement for sharing safeguarding data: NHS England and DHSC are working with DfE and the Home Office to produce a nationally approved model data-sharing agreement with an accompanying template data protection impact assessment to cover the sharing of safeguarding information between children’s safeguarding partners. We are currently engaging with colleagues across health, social care, education and policing to ensure the content is fit for purpose across each setting. The templates will be publicly consulted on and embedded into the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill statutory guidance. This work will reduce burden upon local organisations and bring about a consistent and legally sound approach to the sharing of children’s safeguarding information • proxy access guidance: the report cites the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health (RCPCH) warning that there are issues around consent for sharing data and what age a child becomes an adult. We are currently producing guidance to support the proxy access information standard which will communicate to health and care organisations the importance of age milestones for children and young people consenting to sharing their information through the NHS App and becoming advocates for their own health information, versus younger ages where parents or carers have responsibility for making information sharing decisions on the child’s behalf. Although the standard and guidance are specifically related to sharing children’s information via the NHS App or other patient portals rather than information sharing in a more general sense, it will give health organisations more robust advice to follow regarding consent and parental responsibility for children at different ages • other support to IG professionals: in addition to published guidance, we support IG professionals through our networks, including our fortnightly Data Protection Officer Webinars and our Data IG and forum for ICBs. Next year we will be piloting IG surgeries where IG professionals can bring complex data sharing issues and the ‘surgery’, comprising a group of IG professionals, will collectively problem solve. We hope that this will help unblock local barriers to sharing and allow best practice to be shared • Control of Patient Information Regulations (COPI): DHSC is making changes to the COPI Regulations 2002 to make it easier for NHS bodies to share data for operational purposes and to improve services. This will include a public consultation, to ensure that we hear a wide range of views and can be confident that intended changes both meaningfully address barriers to data sharing and maintain public trust in how data is used