About me case study – Cassie’s story

About Me - Cassie's story

This case study focuses on Cassie, a 69-year-old with learning disabilities who lives in her own self-contained flat with an ‘extra-care’ supported living service provided by Havencare.

Sharing information on how to communicate with Cassie using the About Me Standard enables hospital staff to understand her health procedures and provide care that meets her needs and requirements.

Multi Me is a secure online platform for individuals with disabilities and the circle of people that support them in their daily lives. They have achieved conformance with ‘About Me’, which shows their commitment to standards excellence and robust information sharing, resulting in better health and care outcomes for people.

On this page

The challenge

Cassie has liver failure and has been on the transplant list for many years without success. In early 2024, Cassie became seriously unwell and needed to stay in hospital for 4 months.

During this period, her 1-1 personal support from Havencare would attend the hospital for a few hours each day, but the remaining time, she was under the care of the hospital nursing staff. Especially when unwell, Cassie struggles to express her needs and wishes.  

Woman in hospital being given lunch

The solution - 'About Me'

wiki case study

The PRSB’s About Me Standard includes most important details that a person wants to share with professionals in health and social care. This information might include how best to communicate with the person, how to help them feel at ease or details about how they like to take their medication. 

It is intended to be generic and apply to everyone, from those who have complex care and support needs to those who rarely require care and/or support. 

Using ‘About Me’ information has been shown to achieve huge benefits for people including supporting them through hospital appointments or other care which might not have been possible or resulted in adverse outcomes without understanding key ways to work with the person.

The process

Sharing About Me information
Cassie’s support team shared the information from the ‘About Me’ section of her plan (recorded in her Multi Me Wiki) with the hospital staff.

Wikis are simple, accessible, and easy to build personal websites. They can be used to create multimedia person-centred plans that use pictures, words, video and sound to capture the voice, skills, aspirations and needs of the individual.
Improving care for Cassie
Due to the quality of the about me information in her support plan, specifically the “how to communicate with me” section, visual aids were used to support Cassie, alongside her Independent Mental Capacity Advocate (IMCA) to understand her health procedures.

The hospital staff were also given key information on how to use social stories with Cassie to help her understand important information and decisions.
Cassie's Wiki
The results
Sharing Cassie’s ‘About Me’ information, helped her feel much more settled in hospital, reduced her anxiety, and helped the hospital team engage with her positively with kindness and familiarity.

Cassie returned home after hospital and is making the most of her time given her health situation. Havencare believes that sharing this information was key to Cassie’s recovery and her being well enough to be able to return home.

Feedback

“Re-traumatisation can easily happen in health and social care as people are not treated with individuality or understanding of their lived experience. In Mike’s case, it is reasonable to assume that without shared About Me information in Multi Me, there would have been delays and miscommunication that would have caused distress and the potential for serious incidents. I believe the PRSB's About Me Standard humanises people’s interactions with the system, offering the potential to raise the equality of access to better health outcomes for all people”.
Phil Morris
Phil Morris
Chief Executive, Havencare Homes and Support
"It has been an incredibly positive experience working with Havencare to implement the PRSB About Me Standard. Utilising a template that adheres to the About Me implementation guidelines is an excellent method for gathering truly person-centred data. This approach significantly enhances the quality of care and support provided to those under Havencare's services. Multi ME, in collaboration with our partners at RIX Inclusive Research, is proud to be part of the PRSB's Standards Partnership Scheme, and we look forward to continuing our efforts to improve care standards.”
Charlie Levinson, CEO
Charlie Levinson
CEO, MULTI ME

Resources

The About Me Standard
View the full standard and supporting documentation, examples and other resources.

Conformant partners
Find out which of our PRSB Partners have successfully achieved conformance against the About Me Standard.

Support services
Proactive support for our standards and ongoing maintenance and release management of published standards. 

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.”

“If someone’s been working for a period of time, in a form of therapy, for instance, where there’s an agreed plan for the locality when they may present in an emergency situation … then it’s really important for us to be able to see that that information and be able to act appropriately according to that because, you know, there isn’t and there shouldn’t be a stock response to that. These plans are designed to be individualised and personalised.  All services should be giving that personalised approach to care wherever possible. And a standard such as [PCSP standard] definitely moves us closer towards being able to do that. [Not acting on agreed plans] is a key finding in terms of emergency responses over the years where responses have been inappropriate.” – Mental Health Nurse

“Following a particular plan that’s been put into place will result in much better outcomes and prevent the sort of poor outcome which would otherwise be leading to an unplanned hospital admission.” – General Practitioner