Member statement - The Professional Records Standards Body CiC

We created the Professional Record Standards Body (PRSB) in 2013, intentionally independently of the NHS and government.  PRSB is the UK’s authority on specification of clinical data recording standards for health and social care. Since then, PRSB has successfully provided an expert service to the NHS, 4 nations and industry.  We, the undersigned, make up some of the 180 member and industry partners, supporting PRSB in clinical information standards that are now used routinely across the health and care system.

We want to help the government build an NHS fit for the future. Using consistent and front-line endorsed clinical information standards will accelerate the transformation of the NHS, unlocking productivity and enabling delivery of integrated person-centred care.  All three strategic shifts envisioned for the NHS 10 Year Plan depend on high-quality data: hospital to community, analogue to digital and treatment to prevention.   The impact of inadequately recording high quality, standardised data is more unnecessary A&E visits, unsafe transfers of care, readmissions, and delayed discharges – yet by using standardised data we can improve patient safety, save staff time, and deliver better outcomes.

The future of PRSB and high-quality data is at risk

PRSB’s work has been primarily funded by NHS England.  Their funding for PRSB’s services to engage professional bodies and maintain clinically safe standards will cease in December 2025 with NHS England intending to develop and maintain these in-house.

As members of the PRSB, we believe that removing independent clinical and technical expertise and dis-establishing a trusted, cross-sector community network will reduce the momentum behind digital transformation, and the consequences will be felt across the health and care system, by doctors and nurses, allied health professionals, social care professionals and, most importantly, by patients and service users.

With high quality data at the centre of government policy, enabling better care and supporting innovation and life sciences it does not make sense to remove funding from the only organisation trusted by us to specify our requirements.

The PRSB has played a unique role in uniting clinicians, patients, carers, and system leaders to develop safe, consistent data standards. If it ceases to exist, we risk losing both critical capability and the hard-won trust that underpins successful, joined-up digital care for the 10-year plan.

 

logos

 

 

Read more news
Read more blogs

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.”