Temporary suspension notifications: new MYS route

NHS England has announced that notifications of unplanned temporary suspensions of services (closures) can now be made via the Manage Your Service (MYS) portal.

The Terms of Service require NHS community pharmacy owners to have a business continuity plan for temporary suspensions due to illness or other reason beyond their control and to action the plan when necessary.

One action of any plan is to notify the Integrated Care Board (ICB) of an unplanned temporary suspension, or a likely temporary suspension.

A module has been released to the MYS platform that enables contractors to notify their ICB of any temporary closure of their pharmacy instead of using the paper form or emailing the information to ICB pharmacy teams.

Using the MYS module will automatically ensure that pharmacy contractor notifications are sent directly to the relevant ICB, and will also enable the contractor to see a record of any submissions that have been made via MYS.

The MYS portal can be updated with one or more unplanned, temporary suspensions and is editable for 7 days after it is submitted. It can be used for unplanned temporary suspensions and deleted if there is no subsequent suspension of services.

At this stage, the MYS portal notification route is optional.  ICBs will receive reports of submissions multiple times a day so they are aware of any service suspensions in their area.

The hard-copy notification route can still be used. This can be found on the NHS England website titled Annex 18.

More information on unplanned temporary suspensions can be found HERE.

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