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Scotland Connectivity Equivalents

The hospital estate baseline, shared-record matrix and diagnostic platform matrix add board-level product evidence. TrakCare PMS and a regional portal are separate roles.

This page explains Scotland's healthcare connectivity services, from the network connection to patient identity, clinical exchange, shared information and patient access. Use the UK Healthcare Connectivity Landscape for the four-nation view and Diagnostic Results and Image Exchange for the imaging and results detail.

Current Reading

Scotland uses several connected services with different jobs: SWAN provides network connectivity; CHI identifies patients; ECS/KIS share selected clinical information; SCI Gateway carries referrals and other clinical communications; SCI Store supports locally held clinical information; ePharmacy and GP2GP support specific transactions; and the National Digital Platform (NDP) supplies common services used by applications including MyCare.scot. These cover some of the same functions as England's infrastructure, but a similar function does not establish a shared API or onboarding route (SRC-133 to SRC-137, SRC-198, SRC-264, SRC-376 to SRC-381).

Public Services Delivery Scotland (PSD Scotland) became the successor to NHS Education for Scotland (NES) and NHS National Services Scotland (NSS) on 1 April 2026. Older documentation and several current websites still use the NES/NSS names. MyCare.scot's programme page now identifies PSD Scotland as its programme manager, working with the Scottish Government and COSLA.

MyCare.scot has moved beyond the rollout-plan stage. The Scottish Government's 17 June 2026 announcement confirms national web availability from April and mobile-app availability for adults aged 18 and over. The initial national features include CHI/personal details, medicines and allergies, Covid/flu vaccination records from 2021, and a service finder. Appointment and hospital-letter viewing were already available to the early Lanarkshire dermatology cohort; wider feature coverage, booking, prescription ordering and social-care integration remain staged developments.

Layers and Services

Layer Service and responsibility What crosses the connection Current evidence and technical boundary
Network transport Scottish Wide Area Network (SWAN); BT operates the current service under the national authority. Connectivity between public-sector sites and access to external networks. The catalogue includes PSN/HSCN gateways. Network access does not itself authorise patient-record access or establish a clinical exchange interface.
Patient identity Community Health Index (CHI); NDP Demographics Service provides an application-facing route to CHI information. Patient identifier and demographic information used to identify the correct record. NDP documents an HL7 FHIR representation. Its Demographics Service is described as in production for internal use, with onboarding and permissions required; no public unrestricted CHI API is established.
Care summaries Emergency Care Summary (ECS) and Key Information Summary (KIS); GP-maintained information consumed by authorised care services. Medicines, allergies and selected care information; KIS extends the summary for more complex care needs. NHS 24 and the Scottish Ambulance Service describe operational access. These are summaries, rather than a complete GP record or a generic write-back service.
Referrals and clinical messaging SCI Gateway; national service with local-board access and referral configuration. Structured referral content, clinical communications and attachments. Current NHS guidance and procurement still use SCI Gateway. A national diabetes procurement requires SWAN access to the service; detailed integration is a separate phase, not automatically provided by network access.
Clinical information storage and viewing SCI Store; local-board implementations and their connected clinical systems. Clinical documents and other locally supported information. NHS Lothian's 2025 procedure confirms scanned eCasenotes in SCI Store can be viewed through TrakCare. It does not specify a national SCI Store API or prove that all boards use the same configuration.
Common data and integration services NDP Data Access, Data Storage and Integration services. ECS data retrieval; stored documents, images and structured data; connections between existing NHS infrastructure and cloud applications. Data Access and Integration are listed as in production. Data Access fetches ECS information; Data Storage holds data for identified uses. The catalogue does not establish a single protocol for every NDP service.
Medicines and practice transfer ePharmacy / Acute Medication Service; GP2GP and GP health-record transfer. Prescription transactions or transfer of a patient's GP record to a new practice. These are separate workflows. Public guidance distinguishes within-Scotland electronic GP transfer from printed-record handling for cross-UK moves.
Diagnostic images and results PACS and board image-transfer teams; NDP/SCI Gateway also support the digital dermatology pathway. Radiological images, associated examinations and referral photographs. Local operating guidance, replacement-programme progress and individual pathway integration need to be read separately. The sources here do not establish one national results-and-images API.
Patient access MyCare.scot, developed through the PSD Scotland Digital Front Door programme. Selected information presented to the individual through web and mobile access. National initial service is live; further functions remain staged. ScotAccount provides the public-service sign-in route.

Additional GP Connectivity Functions

The access and registration, safety and prevention, and coding, reporting and payments sections of the UK matrix compare these functions across the four nations. The services below extend the Scottish picture; each has its own access conditions and scope. Evidence checked: 29 September 2026.

Function Scottish service and current boundary
Staff and application access NDP Authentication is in production, using the NHS Scotland identity provider and delegated identity providers. Application onboarding is required. This supports NDP applications; it does not establish CIS2 reuse or one login across every Scottish clinical system.
GP registration and list maintenance Practitioner Services registration guidance describes GP-system transactions that match or create CHI records and initiate medical-record transfer. Transactions are received up to four times daily; CHI changes reach connected screening and clinical systems. Reading ECS/KIS is a separate operation from registration.
Reasonable adjustments NHS inform describes recording adjustments in KIS and hospital passports. This establishes a care-information route, without establishing England's Reasonable Adjustment Digital Flag or an equivalent Scottish API.
Child safeguarding GIRFEC and child protection: the wider wellbeing/support framework includes child-protection processes. Local authorities maintain child-protection registers with appropriate 24-hour access arrangements; GIRFEC, a child’s plan and a national digital flag are different things. A national NHS CP-IS-style interface remains unverified.
Emergency care plans Digital ReSPECT shares plans through GP, hospital and national systems, with board-enabled NHS Scotland single sign-on. The service page names participating boards; it does not establish universal Scottish adoption. KIS remains a separate summary route.
Child health and childhood immunisation recall PHS's May 2026 CHS clinical guidelines, section 2, explicitly state that Child Health System (CHS) replaced CHSP-PS, CHSP-school and SIRS in early/mid-2026. CHS supports review invitations, recording and reporting, including some screening contacts. Retain predecessor names for historical data; the guidance does not establish an exact cutover date for every interface.
Vaccination records NDP Vaccination Service supplies a FHIR interface to NCDS data from the Vaccination Management Tool and GP systems. It is live for internal users and supports retrieval and creation; changes to existing records go through service support. Coverage is not a complete lifetime vaccination history.
Cervical screening Scottish Cervical Call Recall System (SCCRS) is the national cervical-screening system, including electronic test requests and results. Professional access requires the secure NHS connection and credentials. It is separate from England's CSMS.
Clinical terminology PHS distribution guidance routes SNOMED downloads through NHS England TRUD. Scottish implementation support includes a Scottish terminology-server route and UK-extension requests. This does not establish completed migration in every Scottish system or use of England's terminology-server endpoint.
GP data extraction Primary Care Intelligence Service for Scotland (PCIS) provides interim aggregate GP extraction, with oversight approval and practice opt-out. SPIRE was retired on 31 August 2023. PCIS is distinct from direct-care record access and payment processing.
GP payments and claims Practitioner Services / Primary Care Contractor Finance administers payments under Scottish arrangements. Its privacy notice describes registration-data dependencies. These sources establish the national administrative function, without establishing a CQRS-compatible system.

GIRFEC and Child Protection

Getting it right for every child (GIRFEC) is Scotland’s national approach and framework for children’s wellbeing and coordinated support across services. It includes early help and child protection; it is broader than a register of children at risk. The national child-protection guidance places protection within that approach.

  • A child’s plan organises additional support, from one agency or several; where several agencies participate, a lead professional coordinates it. The 2023 GIRFEC practice statement describes this as a non-statutory plan. Having one does not itself mean a child is on a child-protection register.
  • A Child Protection Plan addresses the protection concern and is incorporated into the child’s plan while the significant-harm risk persists. The child-protection register is a distinct record, maintained by local-authority social work, with local enquiry arrangements and appropriate 24-hour access. Support can continue after removal from the register (national guidance §§1.84, 1.87, 1.92–1.94; SRC-608).
  • Information sharing is governed by the purpose and circumstances. GIRFEC information-sharing guidance specifically addresses necessary, proportionate and lawful sharing for child-protection concerns. This guidance is not a specification for a shared database or a software interface.

For the UK comparison, show GIRFEC as the framework and local-authority registers as the operational record route. These sources do not establish a single Scottish NHS CP-IS-style API, a national FGM-IS flag service or InterSystems implementation. This is a limit of the reviewed evidence, not a claim that Scotland has no digital safeguarding systems: the 2023 guidance separately describes Police Scotland’s iVPD child-protection flag for police users (§1.90). That police-system example does not establish GP-system access.

Urgent Care Routing

The four-nation urgent-care comparison separates patient access, triage, service discovery, booking and clinical handoff. Evidence checked: 29 September 2026.

Function Scottish route and evidence boundary
Telephone access and clinical assessment NHS 24 on 111 provides assessment and referral for urgent needs, including when ordinary GP, pharmacy or dental services are closed. It can use ECS/KIS where available. NHS 24 states that subsequent clinical callbacks and appointment times are managed by the local health board; the shared telephone number does not establish England's NHS Pathways deployment.
Digital self-assessment and service discovery NHS inform and NHS 24 Online provide symptom advice and Scotland's Service Directory. The app's privacy notice describes its Call 111 action opening the device dialler. These sources establish public information and signposting; they do not establish automatic transfer of the symptom assessment to a clinician, booked appointments, or an England UEC DoS-compatible API.
Senior clinical review and onward care The Redesign of Urgent Care (RUC) programme connects NHS 24 to board Flow Navigation Centres (FNCs). The January 2025 evaluation describes telephone/video review, self-care advice, scheduled A&E attendance and onward referral. Routes and available services vary locally and by time of day; national programme coverage is not evidence of identical appointment access at every board.
Clinical record and handoff NHS 24 creates a clinical care record and describes sharing with the GP and receiving NHS team, subject to the stated confidentiality arrangements. Its data-protection guidance includes GP out-of-hours, ambulance and A&E recipients. This establishes the information-sharing workflow without specifying a universal referral payload, acknowledgement contract or externally available booking API. Existing SCI Gateway referral evidence does not establish that every NHS 24/FNC handoff uses it.
Supporting platforms NHS 24's November 2025 announcement confirms October implementation of new clinical support/contact-centre systems with Coforge, Pega and AWS. The March 2025 procurement notice identifies Elsevier Clinical Reasoning Engine (CRE) replacing Arezzo. Platform implementation and procurement evidence do not publish an open GP-system integration specification.

Cross-border learning is evidenced; common interfaces are not. NHS 24's December 2023 board report, section 4.1.3, records discussions with NHS England's NHS Pathways team about clinical-content assurance and specialist input. This is a documented learning relationship, not adoption of NHS Pathways, UEC DoS or BaRS. The CRE procurement also records market research through NHS England's Health Systems Support Framework; using that research route does not make the Scottish service an England deployment.

The 31 August 2026 Improving Flow Plan proposes Integrated Navigation Centres and Co-ordination Hubs linking NHS 24, the Scottish Ambulance Service and existing flow-navigation functions. It also proposes further e-triage and gradual MyCare.scot booking development. These are delivery commitments; the plan does not confirm a completed national replacement of FNCs or a live universal scheduling interface.

Cross-Nation Reuse

Some connections are evidenced cross-border exchanges, beyond the functional comparisons above. The NHS Central Register privacy notice describes demographic linkage with CHI, NHS England and Northern Ireland BSO, and notifications that trigger record movement between nations. It also includes Armed Forces enlistment/discharge information and NHS-number sharing for record movement. This supports administrative linkage, without establishing a shared full clinical-record API. Its 2024 legacy system labels should be read alongside newer national transition evidence.

Scotland also uses the SNOMED CT UK Edition and TRUD distribution, while Scottish services participate in requests for UK-extension terms. The NSS ePharmacy endorsing guide and nDCVP operational guidance document dm+d use in prescribing/dispensing exchange and payment processing. These are shared terminology inputs; Scottish ePharmacy and payment rules remain separate service implementations. The dated guides do not identify the currently loaded dictionary release in every system.

See What Actually Crosses Borders for the UK comparison. Shared terminology, demographic movement notices and similar clinical functions each establish different kinds of connection; none alone establishes shared GP Connect, CIS2, e-RS or screening interfaces.

Organisation Reference Data

Public Health Scotland's National Reference Files include organisation codes, locations and GP-practice reference files. They supply national reference identifiers; they are not a single service-endpoint directory or evidence that every consuming system synchronises them identically. See the UK Core Services Matrix for the four-nation comparison.

Portals and Record Access

The application a person opens, the information service behind it and their permission to use it are separate parts of the connection. Scotland's patient and professional routes therefore need to be compared individually with England's national services; this evidence does not identify one national Scottish equivalent of NCRS.

Application or viewing route Who uses it and what it presents Access and availability
MyCare.scot web service and mobile app Individuals viewing selected information about themselves, drawn from connected NHS services. Medicines/allergies come from ECS through NDP Data Access. Initial national service for adults; verified ScotAccount required. Feature coverage is set out below.
NHS board clinical portals Authorised professionals viewing information available through their board's portal, sometimes including other boards' records. A March 2025 government briefing describes varying board permissions and only some boards extending portal access to community pharmacy. It is dated access evidence, not a current nationwide permissions list.
Professional ECS/KIS access NHS 24, ambulance services and other authorised care teams use GP-derived medicines/allergy and selected care-summary information. Access follows the care role and service arrangement. ECS/KIS are information services; their availability does not give every portal user access to a complete GP record.
SCI Store through TrakCare in NHS Lothian A local professional viewing route for scanned eCasenotes. SCI Store holds the documents; TrakCare presents them. The 2025 procedure confirms this connection. Direct research-document uploads require separate NHS Lothian Digital authorisation; viewing and uploading are distinct permissions.
SCI Gateway Referring and receiving services exchange clinical communications and attachments, including the documented dermatology pathway. NHS board IT facilitators arrange new users and locations. This is a referral workflow, with local access arrangements, rather than a general record viewer.

MyCare.scot Features and Availability

Feature Evidenced availability Source or action boundary
Medicines and allergies Initial national service. ECS information retrieved through NDP Data Access; a summary view, not the full GP record.
CHI number and selected personal details Initial national service. Includes details such as the recorded home address; viewing does not imply that the user can update the source record.
Covid/flu vaccination history and service finder Initial national service. Vaccination coverage starts in 2021 and is not a complete lifelong vaccination record; the finder locates health and wellbeing services.
Future hospital appointments and hospital letters Live for the initial NHS Lanarkshire dermatology outpatient cohort, reported on 20 January 2026 following the December launch. This confirms viewing for that cohort, not nationwide appointment coverage or booking.
Appointment booking, test-result access, prescription ordering and wider social-care functions Further development in the programme and national announcement. Do not infer delivery from national app availability or from a feature listed in NDP's underlying platform catalogue.

ScotAccount Integration

ScotAccount supplies the identity-verification and sign-in step; MyCare.scot supplies the health-information view. NHS inform describes verification using photo ID and a camera, with a security-question route for people without photo ID. The programme retains existing ways of contacting services alongside MyCare.scot.

ScotAccount's official integration guidance documents OpenID Connect (OIDC). Its beta is available to eligible Scottish government/public-service teams through onboarding, with testing before an agreed production connection. This is a documented system-to-system authentication route, even though the person signs in through a browser. It does not grant generic proxy rights, GP-record access or permission to update a clinical system; the connected service controls those functions. Integration guidance checked: 30 September 2026.

SWAN and the SWAN2 Transition

SWAN is the underlying public-sector network, not Scotland's clinical record. Its current service catalogue includes Internet connectivity and gateways to PSN/HSCN, as well as separately offered cloud-connectivity and security services. The BT-operated network therefore belongs in the connectivity map below the clinical services that use it.

A Scottish Government FOI response, answered on 27 November 2025 and published on 4 February 2026, identified BT as its Internet/MPLS provider through SWAN. It reported migration of the Government's own estate from Capita's SWAN1 to SWAN2, with completion targeted for March 2026. That is a dated target for that estate, not confirmation that every NHS site has completed migration. NSS's December 2025 board papers also recorded continuing site transitions and a risk that SWAN1 services would need extension.

How the Services Connect

MyCare.scot medicines and allergies: the app makes a request using the person's CHI. NDP's Data Access Service retrieves the information from ECS at request time and returns it. This service does not store the information locally. Retrieval from ECS in real time does not prove that every originating GP record change has already reached ECS.

Referral photographs: the NHS digital dermatology guidance describes PhotoSAF / Consultant Connect using CHI lookup, sending appropriately tagged photographs to NDP Data Storage and making them available as SCI Gateway referral attachments. Further transfer into Docman depends on the practice's configuration. This is a documented pathway, not proof that all radiology or laboratory results use NDP.

Hospital documents: NHS Lothian's procedure describes paper records being scanned into SCI Store and viewed through TrakCare. That is a concrete local storage-and-presentation connection. It should not be expanded into a claim that TrakCare operates SCI Store nationally.

NDP's catalogue separates data access, data storage, demographics and integration. Its Demographics page explicitly names HL7 FHIR; its Integration page describes standards-based interfaces without naming their complete protocol set. The Data Storage page lists appointments/letters, dermatology, the Medical Device Data Hub and ReSPECT as uses. Those platform capabilities do not prove that every feature is available to every MyCare.scot user.

Diagnostic Exchange and Replacement Status

Diagnostic requesting uses health-board and laboratory routes. Edinburgh and Lothians Laboratory Medicine describes GP laboratory ordering through ICE and hospital laboratory/radiology ordering through TrakCare. This illustrates Lothian's delivery arrangements, not a single Scottish ordering product or a verified inventory of every board.

NHS Fife explicitly describes PACS as a national system, allowing previous images to be viewed when patients move between Scottish health boards. Its report-return workflow is described separately; national image access does not establish a national report-delivery interface.

Radiology reports are returned to the referring clinician through the provider's reporting workflow. The matrix describes that existing board/provider route instead of treating the lack of a separately established national report-delivery service as a missing function. Professional record viewing similarly uses the board clinical portals, with differing permissions and cross-board access.

The Scottish Government's 2014–17 eHealth strategy, published in March 2015, identifies CHI, SCI Store and SCI Gateway as nationally adopted systems. SCI Store therefore has national origins, while the current local evidence below describes board implementations. Vision's Scottish pathology guidance documents GP software retrieving laboratory results from configured SCI Stores. These sources support the matrix's qualified pathology-results cell; neither establishes one national endpoint or complete current board/discipline coverage.

NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde's published guidance describes board-managed image transfer, including PACS administration for transfers elsewhere in the UK and an Image Exchange Portal route for individuals or transfers outside the UK. This is local workflow evidence, last reviewed in July 2023 with a July 2026 review date; it does not establish an automatically accessible national or cross-border API.

The Scottish Government's 2025–26 delivery plan marks the PACS reprocurement milestone complete and refers to a ten-year transition plan and preparatory network/equipment work completed in April 2024. NSS's December 2025 board papers still recorded unresolved implementation-plan issues. Procurement completion therefore must not be presented as a completed national replacement or a confirmed cutover date. See Diagnostic Results and Image Exchange for the wider distinction between reports, images and transport mechanisms.

GP Connect-Like Routes

Scotland route Closest England comparison What it supports Boundary
Emergency Care Summary Summary Care Record / urgent-care GP summary access GP-practice-derived emergency summary information for authorised care staff. Summary view, not GP Connect Access Record.
Key Information Summary Enhanced care-summary sharing for unscheduled and anticipatory care GP-maintained key information for patients with complex needs or anticipatory-care requirements. Not a full GP record API.
SCI Gateway GP-to-secondary-care messaging / referral route Electronic clinical communications and referrals between primary and secondary care. Not GP Connect Send Document or Update Record.
GP2GP / GP health-record transfer GP2GP record-transfer comparison Electronic transfer of GP health records to a new GP practice where records are electronic and the move is within Scotland. Not GP Connect Access Record or Send Document; cross-UK moves currently use printed-record handling in public patient guidance.
Acute Medication Service / ePharmacy Electronic Prescription Service Electronic transfer of prescription data to support community pharmacy processing. Functional prescribing equivalent, not the England EPS.
MyCare.scot NHS App / patient-facing record access National web service and mobile app with an initial set of record-access features. Not GP Connect patient-facing APIs; distinguish current features from later expansion.

Spine-Like Routes

Scotland route Closest Spine service function What it supports Boundary
Community Health Index PDS / NHS Number identity function National Scottish patient identifier and core NHS Scotland identity infrastructure. Different identifier, system, and governance from NHS Number / PDS.
National Digital Platform National platform / API / data-access layer Common cloud-based components, including production ECS data access and integration services. A set of services with different roles and access conditions, not a replacement label for Spine.
Emergency Care Summary and Key Information Summary Summary Care Record / care-summary sharing GP-practice-derived summary information for direct care. Not GP Connect and not a full shared care record.
SCI Gateway e-RS / messaging / document exchange functions Electronic referral and clinical communication. Not a Spine Directory Service or MESH clone in this evidence set.

InterSystems Boundary

Scotland has separate InterSystems evidence for Edinburgh office presence, broad TrakCare Patient Management System context, NHS Shetland TrakCare ED / Ensemble, and vendor TrakCare examples. TrakCare Patient Management System (PMS) and TrakCare ED are source or local system labels for TrakCare in specific patient-management and emergency-department settings, not separate national connectivity services. That evidence is tracked on InterSystems in Scotland.

The NHS Lothian procedure adds direct provider-side evidence that TrakCare presents documents held in SCI Store. This supports that local integration and viewing role. It does not identify InterSystems as the owner or national operator of SCI Store, SWAN, ECS, KIS, SCI Gateway, CHI, GP2GP or NDP. The sources reviewed here do not establish an InterSystems implementation of those national services.

Domain Split Trigger

The 15 September 2026 structure decision adds a whole-UK reader overview and England/diagnostic drill-downs. This country page remains the detailed national-service route; supplier evidence stays on the InterSystems-by-nation page. No additional evidence-domain register or request pack is needed.

Follow-up Evidence

  • Resolve SWAN2 completion and PACS replacement cutover at the relevant board or estate level before marking migration complete.
  • Obtain current interface/version and onboarding specifications for SCI Store, SCI Gateway and ECS/KIS before describing implementation protocols.
  • Extend the NDP service catalogue with endpoint/profile/version and access-scope evidence where public; FHIR is evidenced for Demographics, not automatically for every service.
  • Validate any current Scotland GP2GP technical or supplier evidence before treating GP record-transfer support as InterSystems involvement.
  • Validate whether any current Scotland roadmap explicitly references GP Connect before changing the boundary.