Guidance Documents 
One of the core functions of Health Protection Scotland is to facilitate an
effective response to outbreaks and incidents, especially those which are
likely to severely test the NHS and other public services.
In conjunction with their internal knowledge base and expertise, Health
Protection Scotland utilizes information and guidance produced by a wide range
of organisations to do this. Until the development of SHPIR, HPS and other NHS
board health protection staff have relied on locally-held hard-copy resources,
but this has proven inadequate. Physically storing and updating these type of
resources was cumbersome and inefficient, and with each organisation managing
their resources separately, there was a potential lack of consistency and
duplication of effort between Health Protection Scotland and NHS boards.
HPS, in agreement with NHS boards, identified a need to develop a repository
which could be maintained and updated centrally, could be accessed by the users
in an electronic format, and could be searchable and browsable.
SHPIR was developed to meet this need.
The Scottish Health Protection Information Resource (SHPIR)
The content of the Scottish Health Protection Information Resource (SHPIR) has
been derived from the resources that on-call staff have been using at HPS and
within the NHS boards, and is considered to be core information on communicable
disease and environmental hazards. These documents include official guidance,
protocols, guidelines, Scottish Executive Health Department and Department of
Health memoranda, selected peer reviewed papers and other carefully chosen
material relevant to the listed topics.
The purpose of SHPIR is not to be an information bank on health protection
topics, but more a resource which gives the most up to date and relevant
guidance which can be used in an outbreak or incident situation.
http://www.shpir.hps.scot.nhs.uk/
The following documents are considered key documents to SHPIR and HPS:
Further Information
At present, SHPIR is not a publicly available resource and is only
available within the NHS to Health Protection staff, although this
may change in the future.
Last reviewed: 05 January 2010
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