About Us

About us

At the Professional Record Standards Body (PRSB), we work to ensure that health and care professionals have the right information at the right time to support the people they care for.

We do this by developing national standards for health and care records, working closely with people who use services, clinicians, and the teams who design and build digital systems. Our clear, consistent standards help information flow safely across services, supporting better care, safer decisions, and more joined-up services for everyone.

We are an independent, not for profit, community interest company.

We uniquely represent clinical, social care and people.

We are UK-wide, developing health and care standards across the four nations.

Our standards identify the critical set of information needed for safe and high quality care.

We support implementation of standards, helping health and care staff embed standards into everyday practice.

Our goal is that people will only have to share information once, and their records will be available in every care setting including at home.

FAQs

Our standards exist to improve the safety and quality of health and social care, ensuring the right information about a person receiving treatement can be accessed easily by any authorised health and care professional who needs it.

Using digital care records, built on the same standards, means that the information recorded about a person can be shared whenever and wherever appropriate. 

PRSB standards are made up of sections such as diagnoses, medications and allergies and a description of the information that should be recorded under each of these sections. These standards are intended for use by all health and care organisations.

PRSB standards aim to provide a common language for health and social care so that we can ‘bridge the gap’ and provide truly integrated care with information flowing in real time between health and care staff and systems. 

We are a member organisation made up of health and care professional bodies and patient representative groups. We also work closely with people who have used services and systems experts and suppliers. Our work is commissioned by different bodies, including NHS England.

PRSB has developed a wide range of different standards and guidance for use in clinical and care settings. PRSB standards are published on our website and set out the detailed information models for each standard and the guidance that explains how to implement them in IT systems and use them in clinical and professional practice.

People who use services will only have to share information once, and their records will be available in every care setting including at home. In addition to helping professionals to provide safe and effective care, it also means that people have access to their own records and can take greater control of their care.

The information collected from people can also be used to make care better for the future through audit of existing treatments and services, improving the quality of care and research so we know more about illnesses and develop new and better treatments and care options.

How we develop standards

Our work is driven by our membership and by our involvement with public and patient bodies. All our members understand the critical importance of high quality care records and we work together on standard development projects. 

Our work is evidence based and developed through consultation with our members and other relevant stakeholders, focusing on frontline staff and people who use services.

We agree together what information should be recorded at each stage of a person’s treatment and care.  Health and care IT systems can use our standards to enable timely information sharing across multiple services and care settings.

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Methodology wheel

Get involved

We work with health and care professionals, system suppliers, carers and people. We give all our stakeholders an equal voice, actively engaging with our network to identify, develop and support the implementation of standards. Here are some ways you or your organisation can work with us to help us achieve our goals.

Contribute to standards development

Consultation is critical to our work so we can ensure the right information is captured and shared across all of our standards. You can contribute to standards development by attending a webinar or completing a survey for a new standard. Find out more about our open consultations by viewing our current standards in development. 

Join our Standards Partnership Scheme

Join us as a PRSB partner and demonstrate your commitment to standards and their implementation. Our Standards Partnership Scheme offers services to suppliers and providers who wish to receive support on getting their systems ready for implementing our standards. 
Find out more.

Stakeholders

Represent a member organisation on our advisory board

A crucial part of our work is to make sure we bring the right people together – clinicians, social care workers, patients and the public across all four nations. We would like to hear from your organisation if you have an interest in supporting our work and joining our active member advisory board which meets every two months.

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.”