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Our impact
Explore our latest annual report to learn about our
work and impact over the past year.
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What we do 

We develop evidence based standards for digital health and social care records.
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New Quality Partner
Leapmind-iStaffRota is our latest Quality Partner
to achieve conformance against our standards.
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New About Me Standard launched

Version 2.01 of the About Me Standard has now been published
Endorsed standards
0
Member organisations
40
PRSB Partners
40

Latest news

New project launched to improve the sharing and use of data from diabetes management devices.

Investment in device technologies has improved quality of life and reduced emergencies, but much of their potential remains untapped. Health professionals cannot easily access patient generated data, which is often shared via smartphones or proprietary systems. This work will support safe, standardised data sharing to enable more personalised care and help clinicians take a more proactive approach.

We congratulate CACI as our latest Quality Partner to achieve standards conformance.

CACI is our latest Quality Partner to achieve conformance with the Personalised Care and Support Plan Standard for its Certa Care Management System. This reflects a strong commitment to person centred care, supporting consistent sharing of care plans across services. We spoke with CACI about the vision behind Certa, their experience of the PRSB conformance process, and what this means for their customers.

Latest blog: Julian Meres, Health and wellbeing coach

"A shared digital record helps avoid mixed messages about what different professionals are offering. It saves time and makes the whole system work more smoothly."
Care planning relies on standardised, up to date information supported by tools that make it easier to use in practice. PRSB spoke to Julian Meres from the Hillingdon Confederation to explore how care planning is working for his colleagues and patients.

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How can standards benefit you?

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People and
carers

If your care provider uses standards in their systems they can record your information consistently and safely with the right people, at the right time.

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Health and care professionals

Using PRSB standards in your IT systems will reduce time consuming admin and duplication, enabling you to deliver high quality care.

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System
suppliers

Aligning to nationally agreed information standards will support the delivery of cutting-edge health tech solutions for the NHS.

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Health and
care providers

Share accurate, standardised clinical information and coded data across all your services for streamlined care.

Transforming digital information sharing

Our standards demonstrate our commitment to harnessing the power of data sharing to improve patient outcomes.
Find out more about where we are making an impact.

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Better records for diabetes care

Standards are instrumental in improving diabetes care management. The Diabetes Record Information Standard supports a person’s self-management of diabetes by making sure that the right information is sent to the right professional.

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Transferring care between services

Our standard for discharge summaries can streamline the process of transferring patients from hospital back to the care of their GP and local community services, ensuring safe and seamless care.

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Supporting social care

PRSB’s About Me Standard enables people to share information that matters to them with professionals, improving their care experience and ensuring that information is consistently captured between health and social care services.

Closing the gap between potential and practice

Standards are only useful when they are used. We have created implementation toolkits to support health and care professionals, transformation leads and digital specialists to adopt them in their systems and drive change towards more digitised and integrated care.

Driving digital change in health and care

At PRSB we are dedicated to the development and implementation of health and care information standards.

By using digital standards in health and care IT systems, vital information can be accessed by the right people, in the right place, at the right time.

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Our members are our strength

“The PRSB has maintained a consistent message for ten years. These standards are vital for patient safety.”
Jane Dacre
Emeritus Professor of Medical Education UCL
"PRSB standards ensure consistent, high-quality care records, which are pivotal for improving safety and outcomes for people."
Jane Townson
Chief Executive, Homecare Association
"The PRSB continues to play a crucial role bringing together key organisations and shaping healthcare information for the future."
James Davies
Director for England, Royal Pharmaceutical College

Partnering for progress

The PRSB Standards Partnership Scheme connects IT system suppliers and commercial organisations with the PRSB to accelerate the implementation of standards. 

The scheme is supported by system leaders in the NHS and social care and offers standards conformance assessment led by experienced PRSB clinical advisors.

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Better records for better care

Personalised care and support planning for people with severe mental illness

A review of a sample of current care plans, and the way they have been developed, may be helpful in identifying the priorities for this improvement. The PRSB Implementation Guide provides more detailed explanations about each element of the plan, including advice on how the planning process might be best conducted.
These questions might form a checklist for current plans to be compared with. 

1. Does the plan include an About Me section in which the service user, in their own words, can indicate the information they want to be available about their lives, their values, their interests, and priorities, available for all those who may care for them?
2. Is the approach to developing a care plan patient centred and engaging, allowing plans to be based on patient priorities goals, and aspirations, along with the actions they plan to take and the support that they will receive?
3. Is there space for a “formulation” to be recorded in which the person receiving care and the professionals who provide it, share and record the personal meaning and the origins of the person’s difficulties?
4. Are relevant procedures and therapies recorded?
5. Where relevant, are one or more contingency plans included for anticipatable disruptions, exacerbations, or deterioration, and do they include advice on what to do and points of contact for those called upon to respond?
6. Where relevant are additional supporting plans incorporated, (an example being an “educational and health plan” for someone with a neurodevelopment disorder)
7. Is a version of the plan available to a service user (if they wish to have it) in a form and format that they can understand and find to be of value?
8. How is a version of the plan available to the GP and other key parts of the health and care system?

Work conducted by PRSB and partners recently has looked specifically at the suitability of this approach to the development and documentation of care and support plans for people with Severe Mental Illness. This resulted in an updated version of the standard (v1.4), for use by any service and for any group of service users, but with some modifications to ensure that it meets the needs of this community. The approach to a patient centred process of identifying goals, hopes, and values, and the support needed to achieve them, is fully compatible with and can be conducted using, specific tools in use in mental health, such as DIALOG, DIALOG+, and ReQoL, for example. 

Where analysis indicates the need for improvement in the content and process of personalised care and support planning for patients with Severe Mental Illness, specific improvement projects should be instituted to co-design with service users and their representatives, and the relevant staff groups, new approaches, and documentation that would be of value in delivering improvement. The toolkit includes a range of existing resources that could be used to engage in this improvement work, including signposting to relevant existing approaches informed by patient experience-based design.

Moving to a single holistic plan

A review of a sample of current care plans, and the way they have been developed, may be helpful in identifying the priorities for this improvement. The PRSB Implementation Guide provides A key development, consistent with national policy on support for Personalised Care across all health and care sectors, is the move towards an individual with complex needs having a single, integrated, care plan, rather than a series of plans developed by different parts of the health and social care system in isolation of one another. For a patient with severe mental illness, the related concerns and challenges might form a very prominent part of such an integrated plan; many will also have concurrent health challenges and needs. The intention is that the relevant services work together to plan and wrap support around the patient and their family in an integrated way, rather than as a series of sequential or disconnected encounters in which the service user or their friends and family have to adopt the role of the integrator.

A starting point would be to agree priority groups of service users who may already have more than one care plan because they need care from more than one part of the system of health and social care. This could be initiated by looking at service users registered with some sentinel practices or PCNs. Alternatively, the approach might focus initially on people with defined co-morbidity or risk that entails collaborative care with agencies beyond specialist mental health services.

The focus here is on the process of care planning and agreement on what should be shared, rather than solely on the technology used;

1. What is the process to agree which professional will initiate care planning and act as the “lead point of contact” for the service user?
2. Will initial plans be agreed with the service user in joint consultations or sequentially? Where and how will they be conducted?
3. What will be the process to agree the elements of the plans which should be available to professionals and potential authorised users beyond the immediate care teams, (A&E services, Ambulance Services, Social services, etc.) with the service user’s consent?
4. How will elements of the plan be updated following consultations in a way which is proportionate, to allow contact and progress notes to be maintained by the service conducting the consultation, whilst avoiding unnecessary work for partners in care if there is no significant change to the personalised care and support plan?
5. What are the implications for workload, logistics, and administration arising out of these decisions?

The answers to these questions and others will best be elicited through focused joint working, grounded in real, or at least realistic examples. This will entail process mapping, and co-design with a range of professionals, service users, and families. Resources from the toolkit and outputs from the Simulation element of this project will be valuable. Some organisations would adopt an approach such as a Rapid Process Improvement Workshop, planned over several weeks and conducted over a number of sequential days, to develop prototype ways of working that could be tested in the field.