Spine Directory Service - data scope and quality

The Spine Directory Service (SDS) is a data store that holds data used by other national and local systems.

It contains four different types of data:

• organisations - NHS organisations, their sites and departments, as retrieved from the Organisation Data Service (ODS)
• people - health and social care workers who access national digital services via the Care Identity Service
• IT systems - that connect to our national services and are thus registered as 'accredited systems'
• reference data - of various types, such as national RBAC 'baselines'

The remaining sections on this page give details on the data scope and quality for each of these.

If you cannot find what you're looking for here, another good place to look is part 5 of the Spine External Interface Specification.

Scope of records

SDS holds data for all organisations that are registered in the Organisation Data Service (ODS) i.e. all organisations with an ODS code.

Data source

The organisation data in SDS comes from ODS via an automated feed.

Data scope and quality

For details on the scope and quality of data in ODS, see the ODS Reference Data Catalogue.

Scope of records

SDS holds a person record for everyone who has a Care ID issued by Care Identity Service (CIS).

Historically this has meant 'everyone with a smartcard', but more recently it has been possible to use a Care ID with alternative authenticators, so it's more accurate to say 'everyone with a Care ID'.

As of July 2026, there are over 1.6 million people with active Care IDs.

Not all health and social care workers have a Care ID. But, you do need a Care ID to access some important national services, including:

• managing patient demographic information in the Personal Demographics Service
• prescribing and dispensing medicines via the Electronic Prescription Service
• sending and receiving referrals from primary to secondary care using the e-Referral Service
• accessing the National Care Records Service

So, for example, it's likely that SDS holds records for:

• the majority of GPs, who are both prescribers and referrers
• the majority of pharmacists, who are dispensers

Note that we do not have empirical evidence for the above statements.

Other areas are likely to be more patchy. For example, not all secondary care clinicians have a Care ID.

Data source

Person records in SDS are created from three sources:

• an automated feed from Electronic Staff Record - for secondary care staff who require Care IDs - but not all secondary care organisations have this feed enabled
• when a health or social care worker registers for a Care ID via Apply for Care ID
• when a Registration Authority registers someone with a Care ID through Care Identity Management

The data fields and data quality can vary depending on the source. For example, when a user registers through Apply for Care ID, their name is captured from an identity document such as a passport.

Professional identifiers

Some professional identifiers are updated via a feed from ODS which ultimately takes information from two sources:

• NHSBSA for DIN number, GMP number and GMC number
• Electronic Staff Record for consultant code

Other professional identifiers, such as NMC number and GDC number, are not maintained at all.

The data is updated fortnightly. For more details, see the table in the next section.

Data quality

The following table lists some of the key data attributes and comments on their completeness and quality.

Email addresses

SDS does not hold healthcare workers' email addresses.

We do hold email addresses in other data stores within CIS, and we make them available through the CIS2 Auth user info endpoint. However, we do not recommend using them because:

• they are not verified
• they are not kept up-to-date
• some of them are personal email addresses
• we do not necessarily have permission to share them

Phone numbers

SDS does not hold healthcare workers' phone numbers.

Details to follow.

Details to follow.