Could your team work through a digital care record outage?

A care service can have a continuity plan and still find that staff are unsure how to use it when a record system becomes unavailable. This practice briefing, checked on 5 November 2026, suggests a short discussion exercise for managers to run within their existing arrangements.

Digital Care Hub’s resources for care providers include a continuity plan for data and cyber security and a plan audit tool. The National Cyber Security Centre’s incident preparation guidance recommends identifying critical information and systems, assigning responsibilities and testing whether backups can be restored.

Start with one fictional scenario

Choose a quiet time for a tabletop exercise. Ask the team to imagine that its usual digital care record cannot be accessed at the start of a shift. Keep the live system running and use fictional information. Invite the staff who would make decisions on that shift, including someone who covers outside normal office hours.

Walk through how staff would recognise the problem, find the current approved instructions and contact the responsible person. Ask where the information needed for essential work would come from and who can authorise the fallback arrangements. Record any point where staff depend on a colleague who is unavailable or on instructions held inside the inaccessible system.

Ask the supplier what recovery involves

Use the exercise findings in a discussion with the supplier or IT lead. Clarify which failures the service’s fallback covers, how staff receive outage updates and what happens to entries recorded while the system is unavailable. Ask who checks that information is complete when normal access returns.

For backup arrangements, ask the responsible technical lead to explain what was tested, when it was tested and whether the results met the organisation’s recovery needs. An exercise can help identify questions that need a specialist answer before a real incident.

Close the gaps and repeat the scenario

Give each finding an owner and a review date. After updating the approved plan, repeat the unclear part with a different shift. The useful evidence is whether those staff can find the instructions and explain their next step. Any changes to care delivery or access to personal information should follow the service’s established procedures.

Featured image: AI-generated illustration.