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National Service Framework documents

  • Last modified date:
    16 April 2008

The Children's NSF is a 10-year programme intended to stimulate long-term and sustained improvement in children's health. Setting standards for health and social services for children, young people and pregnant women, the NSF aims to ensure fair, high quality and integrated health and social care from pregnancy, right through to adulthood.

At the heart of the Children's NSF is a fundamental change in thinking about health and social care services. It is intended to lead to a cultural shift, resulting in services being designed and delivered around the needs of children and families. The Children's NSF is aimed at everyone who comes into contact with, or delivers services to children, young people or pregnant women. 

The Children's NSF is composed of a number of documents:

Part One:

The Core Standards document sets out five standards which will help the NHS, local authorities and their partner agencies to achieve high quality service provision for all children and young people and their parents or carers.

Part Two:

Standards six to ten address children and young people and their parents who have particular needs and should be implemented in conjunction with the standards in the Core Document.

Part Three:

This section addresses the particular needs and choices of women and their babies before or during pregnancy, throughout birth, and for the first three months of parenthood. It should be implemented in conjunction with the other standards, where appropriate.

Versions

The key issues that the Children's NSF addresses for primary care practitioners are to implement the parts of the standards that are relevant to their daily work and help to deliver high quality care for pregnant women, children, young people and their families.

A number of versions of the NSF have been produced to inform children, young people and parents about the NSF and what it will mean for them. 

Exemplars

The exemplars are based around a child's journey through care, and illustrate how the standards and key themes of the NSF can be put into practice.

Supporting documents

The Information Strategy addresses the key information technology challenges that need to be met in providing services for children and their families; challenges that face national agencies and local organisations across all care settings.

Supporting Local Delivery, produced jointly by DH and DfES, sets out the national support that will be provided to local agencies to support them in implementing the National Service Framework for children, young people and maternity services. It also identifies how the NSF, and the wider health agenda, fits into the Every Child Matters: Change for Children programme, and what this means for health organisations

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