Hi everyone, 
We’re always looking for ways to improve the NHS PDS and make it more useful for our users. That’s why we want your feedback—you’re the experts using our tools day-to-day, and your insights can help us build something better together.
Are there challenges you’ve faced with PDS? Features you’d like to see? Or maybe you’ve got a brilliant idea to enhance the experience? Let’s talk about it! 
We’re hosting user feedback sessions to hear directly from you. These sessions are informal, open discussions where you can share your thoughts, experiences, and suggestions. It’s a chance to have your voice heard and help improve the user experience of of PDS.
If you’re interested in joining, please drop me an email at kitty.shen@nhs.net or leave your contact details below, and I’ll reach out to arrange a time that works for you.
Your input is invaluable, and together, we can make a real difference. Looking forward to hearing from you!
Best,
Kitty Shen
Product Owner, Demo 101, NHS England
Hi Kitty,
One of the things that needs to be improved, especially with respect to PDS and the Digital Onboarding Service, is the guidance about using the generic PDS test data which, despite being advised otherwise, do get updated by onboarding organisations. This means the actual details of these records on spine PTL are different to those given in the published test data pack. This results in frequent instances of people venting their frustration via the Test Data mailbox and placing unnecessary burden on already thin resources.
A solution would be to direct onboarding organisations to create their own PDS test data packs using the Test Data Self Service Portal (TDSSP) in the first instance rather than relying on generic packs that cannot be locked down. We have streamlined our process for creating TDSSP accounts and it is much less demanding than dealing with irate customers.
Cheers,
Nick.
Principal Systems Engineer, Delivery Lead, Delivery Manager & Product Manager
Test Data Cloud Services – Spine, GPES and National Datasets
Data Governance, Assurance and Testing
Data and Analytics
NHS England
1 Like
Thanks Nick, i’ll pick up with you next week on this
Hi Kitty,
Happy to have a call about our experience. I used to work for NHS England (also for short periods on PDS) and was aware of the test packs.
Our use case was to support test scenarios mostly around cancer and rare disease diagnostic pathways for all home nation NHS.
This currently involves several NHS Trusts and one NHS ICS at present but this is likely to increase. Most of these had already onboarded to PDS and ODS.
Our main requirement for PDS int was it to act like PDS live i.e. be realistic, so ODS codes in PDS int env were also in ODS int env and patient demographics didn’t get unrealistic amendments (like a 40 year man changing to 3 year old girl).
These all caused issues during onboarding a NHS ICS to our system, several tests failed because of issues around these.
Another requirement we may have, is that PDS also returns the other home countries NHS identifiers that it knows (i.e. a patient has moved from Scotland to England, PDS knows the CHI Number. Same for HSC Number for Norther Ireland, armed forces numbers).
These may be really helpful to us to match patient records - for example one organisation may be using old CHI Number and another the newly assigned English NHS Number.