PRSB publishes new standard for sharing child health information - PRSB

PRSB publishes new standard for sharing child health information

October 1, 2017

Every child deserves a great start in life and the PRSB’s new standard for recording child health events will help professionals to achieve this, by ensuring that everyone involved in a child’s care has access to the right information.

Part of the Healthy Child Programme to improve the health of children and prevent illness, the standard spells out what data on screening tests, immunisations and other developmental milestones should be accessible for parents and professionals to ensure they have the necessary information to make the right decisions for safer care. From GPs to school nurses, children often receive care from a wide range of different health and care services.

For these services to work well together, they will need to share the right information between their IT systems, which can only be done if it’s recorded in a standardised way. Developed in partnership with NHS Digital and NHS England, the standard will enable better information sharing.

The information standard has been developed in consultation with parents and health and care professionals and will help professionals and parents to make the right decisions about their child’s care. Standardised and comparable information provides the foundations for future innovations and improvements in health and care.

Speaking about the standard, newly appointed PRSB chair and GP, Professor Maureen Baker CBE, said: “I am convinced that this new way of sharing standardised information digitally will support this goal by enabling safer and more efficient care, as well as better support for children and their families.”

Dr Andy Spencer, who was the clinical lead on the project on behalf of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, said: “It is important that we empower parents to get involved in their child’s health and development. Once implemented, this new improved way of sharing information will give parents the same access to their child’s personal health record as health and care professionals, and they will always know who the records are being shared with and why.”

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.
• 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 ‘about me’ 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.
• Different participants in the group will have different roles and will bring to the group and their roles their own histories, language, and ‘rules’. 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 ‘rules’ 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. ‘Historicity’ is a term coined to express how the group’s problems and potentials can only be understood against their own history.

• ‘We’ve always done it this way’, ‘that didn’t work before’, ‘it’s always like this’, ‘it wasn’t always like this’, ‘they are changing things again’, 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.

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. “An 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.”