Our Core Hours are 9.00am to 5.00pm on Business Days. Business days are Monday to Friday, excluding Scottish Public Holidays (25 December, 26 December, 1 January, 2 January, Good Friday and Easter Monday).
A service issue or incident can be reported at any time through our Service Desk Portal: https://nesdigital.atlassian.net/servicedesk/customer/portal/7/group/87/create/447
A triage process will determine the priority level and subsequent response time. Triage, response handling and resolution of service issues will only be provided within our Core Hours. For issues not caused by the Application we will escalate the issue to the Service Provider of the service causing the issue.
Following the initial reporting of an Issue there will be:
Not all Issues will necessarily have a specific resolution. This will depend on many factors such as impact (e.g. how many users are affected), urgency and complexity. Where coded or database changes have to be performed in order to resolve an Issue then the time for resolution will depend on development and deployment timescales. The Issue’s originator would be kept reasonably informed of progress and resolution.
We will assign priority to Issues from 4 options:
Only Major Incidents will be classified as Urgent.
Issues will be of 2 possible types, a Normal Incident and a Major Incident.
| Priority Level | Description |
| Low | Issues are likely to include minor corrections and cosmetic faults |
| Medium | Issues are likely to include unauthorised changes to the Software, failure of minor features, performance degradation that inconvenience Authorised Users |
| High | Issues are likely to include failure of major functions (e.g. inability to record updates). Additionally, performance degradation that seriously inconveniences Authorised Users and / or poses a clinical risk |
| Urgent | Issues only comprise Major incidents |
Depending on the nature of the Issue, it may be closed in a number of possible outcomes which include:
We acknowledge that resolution of an Issue, particularly known problems, may require a coded solution that will be dependent on development resources to code, review, test and be deployed on set days. A Major Incident may require a more immediate code update dependent on completion of a risk assessment.
We aim to comply with the following target times for responding to and resolving Issues. If we are unable to progress resolving an Issue because it requires further information from the end user or Board the waiting period will not count towards these times.
| Type | Priority | Response Times |
| Normal | Low |
|
| Normal | Medium |
|
| Normal | High |
|
| Major | Urgent |
|
Incidents reported outside of the core hours will be dealt with in one of two ways:
Urgent Incident Phone Number (Out of hours) 0141 468 4999.
Urgent Incident Definition (Out of hours): We define a Urgent incident as an incident where a Clinician is unable to read patient data during critical patient care. Incidents where the ability to create and update are unavailable will be defined as High, Medium or Low.
We aim to have 99% availability for digital ReSPECT each year, over 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.
Availability doesn’t include maintenance events or third party caused disruptions/outages or disruptions/outages caused by Force Majeure.
Any maintenance event that involves a predicted downtime in excess 3 hours is regarded as exceptional and will be notified to our users, through the agreed point of contact, at least two weeks in advance.
Where possible, planned upgrades will be made outside of normal business hours.
Unplanned/short notice downtime is sometimes necessary and outside our control. We will immediately bring this to the attention of our users, through the agreed point of contact. As much notification and warning as possible will be provided and all efforts made to restore normal functional operation as soon as possible.
As part of our quality of service, we have designed the service to be resilient (see our SSP). The objective is to have:
A failure is any incident which results in a loss of service to the user. If the above service levels are breached our Associate Director for Digital will be required to provide an explanation to our Director. The Director will be responsible for ensuring that remedial action is taken to avoid future issues.