Member Q&A with GS1 UK

We are delighted to welcome GS1 UK as our new Member! Have a look at our Q&A with their Senior Engagement Manager, Georgina Lawton, to find out about her views on information sharing in health and care and the role of standards. 

Why do you think information standards are important – how do they help information for care flow? 

Information standards are important to ensure that data is captured accurately and consistently across different healthcare records and different health and care organisations. This provides professionals with access to all the necessary information about the person, to inform their decision-making. People can also be assured that the right information can be captured and shared to ensure patient safety and improve their care.

How do you hope GS1 UK will benefit from membership of the PRSB?

We are really looking forward to working together on our shared goal of standardising data for the benefit of people using health and care services. The membership will enable us to work closer to this. We know that GS1 UK will benefit from knowledge from other members of PRSB and sharing our experiences too.

How can we jointly create more pull in the system to get standards used so people’s information is available when and where it is needed for care?

It is important that we work collaboratively with all healthcare organisations nationally, regionally and locally to support the adoption of standards. This can be driven by an agreed communication approach by all members across all engagement channels in healthcare.

We work with member organisations who represent more than 1,260,000 frontline clinicians and care professionals as well as patients and the public. Find out more about our membership: https://theprsb.org/aboutus/membership/.

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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.

Engeström’s expansive learning cycle of learning actions explains how there are 7 stages of learning actions;

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.”