PRSB strategy

Our strategy

PRSB exists to ensure the voices and expertise of its members and stakeholders (people, health and social care professionals, system suppliers and others) are fully represented in prioritising, developing and deploying standards to deliver better care digitally. This page outlines our plans and priorities.

On this page

Our role and value in the health and care system

Bringing people together

PRSB’s purpose is to bring together all the disciplines across health and care with people who use those services to define the information needed to support high quality, integrated care. We are experts in developing care record standards that are widely supported and endorsed by UK-wide bodies.  We manage and maintain those standards and ensure consistency so that standards remain current and relevant.

Representing your interests

Our role encompasses much more than codifying the standards.  We represent everyone who has a stake in digitising health and care, from setting priorities for standards through to ensuring they are implemented in a way that is helpful and useful rather than an additional burden on a hard-pressed workforce. We support suppliers and providers to support them on their journey to interoperable data and to provide independent assurance of conformance with our standards.

Together we are stronger

Our combined views inform national bodies and governments across the UK. We play a valuable and influential role in developing solutions that support the work of professionals and suppliers and enable delivery of the kind of integrated care that we all want.

Our vision for the future

People can easily access, use and update information in their care records and are enabled to self-manage their own care

Truly integrated care is the norm with information centred on the person rather than the care setting

Standards are in widespread use (they are useful, usable and used) and delivering the benefits they promise universally, rather than for the few

Standards, and the digital solutions they enable, are implemented in ways that enhance the work experience of professionals enabling them to be efficient and effective and deliver better care for their patients

Access to the standardised data needed for best care is a normal part of the working life of professionals with recognition that ‘data is care’

Strategy and business plan

Develop and assure information standards that support integrated health and social care

Activites

Develop information standards that help drive integrated health and social care. Make progress on implementation of discharge and Transfers of Care.

Continuously improve our methods/guidance to make standards easier to understand, assure, endorse, implement and use.

Improve the quality and consistency of our repository of standards and their inter-relationships through strengthened processes and transparency on how they

Outcomes

Information standards support members priorities.  We can prove the benefits of standards adoption through case studies and evaluation with discharge as an exemplar.

PRSB standards are high quality, consistent and proven to be useful, usable and used in practice.

Stakeholders have a better understanding of the standards and how to use them. They feel well-supported by a high-quality, responsive Support and Maintenance service.

Support and enable widespread use of information standards

Activites

Recruit and retain suppliers to our Partner Scheme, growing the number of conformance assessments.

Positively influence policy and practice in assessing conformance with standards including legislation and enforcement. Increase signposting and use of PRSB Quality Mark in frameworksand procurements.

Strengthen relationships with integrated care systems and key CIO, CCIO,CNIO networks, build understanding of their challenges and provide products and services that support them to implement standards.

Outcomes

PRSB is recognised as having a strong and active community of implementors who provide insight, improve standards and influence national strategy for standards inhealth and care

Conformant systems (supplier and provider) increased by 50%.

Conformance assessment is widely viewed as the independent evidence of the implementation of standards.

Standards are implemented widely by system suppliers and local organisations and deliver benefits in care.

Support people to participate in their health and care through better shared care records

Activites

Develop, diversify and grow our people networks and member organisations. 

Widen awareness and usage of the ‘About Me’ standard and secure adoption in NHS App of all UK nations.

Drive improvement by influencing people’s increased use and access to their shared care records.

Campaign to increase patient awareness and delivery of meaningful, high-quality discharge information to patients.  

Outcomes

PRSB is recognised as a strong advocate for people in standards and digital.

Personalised, integrated care is advanced through use of ‘About Me’ .

Meaningful shared care records are increasingly available and accessed by people.

Increased awareness and receipt of high quality and timely discharges to patients. 

Collaborate, increase our influence, and leverage the power of our networks

Activites

Strengthen links and usefulness to UK nations/internationally. 

Strengthen advocacy relationship with members and suppliers by identifying and collaborating on priorities of mutual interest.

Build stronger links and understanding of the value of PRSB standards to research, clinical audit, AI and other uses. Undertake proof of concept with HDRUK or other.

Increase the number of clinical and professional advocates in our network and develop their skills and understanding of the standards. 

Outcomes

PRSB is useful and valued across UK. There is increased UK and international alignment on standards.  

Members/suppliers actively promote PRSB with ministers, NHS and social care key decision makers.

Case study evidence to demonstrate the benefits end encourage closer alignment of data for direct care and other uses. Improved data quality and reduced burden of unnecessary collections.

Professional network members contribute to projects and are active in advocating for PRSB across health and social care.

Develop a highly skilled and motivated team & efficient processes

Activites

Develop and implement a resource strategy and partnerships to secure flexible access to resources and skill sets. 

Refine our salary policy and framework clearly linking skills, experience and training needs to career progression. 

Develop our people and total reward and retention policies. 

Strengthen our quality assurance policy and processes and progress towards ISO9001. Increase the number of clinical and professional advocates in our network and develop their skills and understanding of the standards. 

Outcomes

Projects resource demands met flexibly and cost effectively and quality maintained. 

More highly skilled and professionally qualified team, strengthened staff satisfaction and commitment to the PRSB.

Quality and consistency of our products improved – progress towards ISO90001 accreditation.

A quality culture and drive for continuous improvement.   

Build our financial stability and sustainability

Activites

Maximise opportunities to support implementation and assurance of standards.

Secure appropriate income to deliver a robust Support and Maintenance service and to professionally manage our standards assets.

Diversify our income sources through new customers, funders and products and reduce over-reliance on any single funding source.

Outcomes

Implementation/assurance to account for over 30% of PRSB income.

An affordable and professional support and maintenance and standards management function is in place.

£0.372m of income from new customers/sources/products leading to increased financial resilience.

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.”