The Board

Meet the Board

The PRSB Board are a group of health and care professionals and industry experts who oversee the development and implementation of PRSB information standards across the UK. Together they areĀ passionate about making health and care better for everyone, using good data to support safer and more connected care.

Reecha Sofat Chair

Professor Reecha Sofat
Chair of the PRSB

Professor Reecha SofatĀ practices general internal medicineā€Æand is also anĀ Associate Director at theĀ British Heart FoundationĀ Data Science CentreĀ which is led by Health Data Research UK (HDRUK).Ā 

Reecha was also announced as aĀ Fellow of theĀ Academy of Medical Sciences inĀ May 2024, recognising her remarkable contribution to advancing biomedical and health sciences, ground-breaking research discoveries and translating developments into benefits for patients and wider society.ā€ÆĀ 

Oliver Lake

Oliver Lake
Chief Executive Officer

With 20+ years in the NHS, OliverĀ has expansive executive leadership skills in transformation, communications, public engagement, programme management and IT, with over 12 years at director level.Ā 

Prior to joining PRSB in 2022,Ā OliverĀ completed a secondment to set up the highly successful national Covid-19 vaccination programme.Ā He hasĀ held responsibility for the development and delivery of commercial partnerships with public, private and third sector organisations, particularly in the field of at-scale transactional, technology, clinical and consulting services.

Dr Afzal Chaudhry
Non-executive Director

Dr Afzal Chaudhry is a Consultant Nephrologist and the Chief Medical Information Officer at Cambridge University Hospitals Foundation NHS Trust (CUH). 

He leads the CUH eHospital programme delivering a trust-wide HIMSS Stage 6 electronic patient record, and the Informatics component of the Population and Quantitative Science theme in the Cambridge NIHR Biomedical Research Centre. 

Dr Chaudhry is also the secondary care representative on the NHS Standardisation Committee for Care Information.

Board photo CK

Charlie McCay
Non-executive Director

Charlie McCay is the owner of Ramsey Systems, a healthcare information consultancy business, working with HL7, ISO and CEN to enable effective and safe sharing of information.Ā 

Charlie McCay has spent more than 30 years providing digital leadership and technical expertise to the NHS Ā and international healthcare organisations focusing on interoperability standards, information modelling and frameworks for assessing the quality and safety of digital technologies including health apps.

Claire Sutton

Claire Sutton
Non-executive Director

Claire Sutton is a registered nurse with over 10 years experience and was appointed the Transformational Lead for the Independent Health and Social Care (IHSC) in August 2022. She has previously worked in care homes, private hospitals, as a member of the clinical safety team for a software supplier and Digital Transformation Lead for the National Care Forum. 

Claire brings great expertise and leadership skills developed during a long career in social care, coupled with a strong interest and background in informatics and the digital social care agenda.

C Graham

Chris Graham
Non-executive Director

Chris has been CEO of Picker since 2017, leading the organisation as well as contributing to its research and practice.

Prior to becoming CEO, Chris led Pickerā€™s research division where he was responsible for overseeing the development and coordination of large-scale research and evaluation projects, including the NHS Patient and Staff Survey Coordination Centres.Ā 

Chris has also worked at the CQC and its predecessor, the Healthcare Commission.

CHAT theory also explicitly addresses five areas which if addressed systematically will help overcome stakeholder differences in pursuit of the common goal:

1. Understanding the artefacts that characterise the group and its activity.
ā€¢ The artefacts might be clinical settings or the forms and templates used to capture and share information. During the pilot we heard about hard copy Dialog response forms; locally generated templates for collating information from different systems; letters and emails to GPs; images, poems or other non-text artefacts that service users might want to include in their ā€˜about meā€™ or care plan.

2. Understanding the multi-views of the group. Such groups are always a community of multiple points of view, traditions and interests.Ā 
ā€¢ Different participants in the group will have different roles and will bring to the group and their roles their own histories, language, and ā€˜rulesā€™. During our Stocktake preparations and workshops we worked with psychiatrists, mental health nurses, occupational therapists, social workers, transformation leads and voluntary sector representatives, all professions and interests with their own language, approaches professional ā€˜rulesā€™ but united in their interest in care plans, care planning.

3. Activity systems (like the ICSs) take shape and get transformed over periods of time. ā€˜Historicityā€™ is a term coined to express how the groupā€™s problems and potentials can only be understood against their own history.Ā 

Ā 

ā€¢ ā€˜Weā€™ve always done it this wayā€™, ā€˜that didnā€™t work beforeā€™, ā€˜itā€™s always like thisā€™, ā€˜it wasnā€™t always like thisā€™, ā€˜they are changing things againā€™, are all typical statements that often frustrate those charged with overseeing change initiatives. Without addressing the experiences that lie behind such comments you risk repeating mistakes of the past, alienating your stakeholders or just not understanding the real starting point for your transformation project. This is particularly the case for the implementation of the PCSP standard, the success of which will be largely reliant on point-of-care practices and information protocols as well as having systems which are user friendly and appropriately configured.

4. The central role of contradictions as sources of change and development. Contradictions are not the same as problems or conflicts. Contradictions are historically accumulating structural tensions within and between activity systems. Collectively addressing contradictions in how policy, practice, culture and technology interact will empower teams to find genuinely novel solutions for apparently intractable challenges, like interoperability and shared care plan/planning.Ā 

This links to the fifth principle that:

5. the possibility of expansive transformations in activity systems. As the contradictions of an activity system are aggravated, some individual participants begin to question and deviate from its established norms. In some cases, this escalates into collaborative envisioning and a deliberate collective change effort. ā€œAn expansive transformation is accomplished when the object and motive of the activity are re-conceptualised to embrace a radically wider horizon of possibilities than in the previous mode of the activity.ā€

Successful teams have the functional skills to lead a task, benefit from diversity, and are led in a way that creates time and space for reflection; the ability to take stock periodically, of the task and of the way in which the team is engaged in delivering it. Your stakeholder analysis [HYPERLINK] should help you assemble the most appropriate team and identify how the team interacts and relates to other stakeholders like sponsors, services users, etc.

The variation in the size, both in terms of population served and numbers of constituent organisations, and of complexity, between Integrated Care Systems, precludes the possibility of any prescriptive guidance on the way in which this team is assembled.

Engestrƶmā€™s expansive learning cycle of learning actions explains how there are 7 stages of learning actions;