Improving health information standards in Ireland – HIQA

Improving health information standards in Ireland

PRSB is working with The Health Information and Quality Authority (HIQA) to provide specialist training and advice on setting and maintaining health information standards in Ireland. This includes sharing proven methodologies, tools and lessons learnt and clinical safety considerations.

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Background

The Health Information and Quality Authority (HIQA) is an independent authority established to drive high-quality and safe care for people using our health and social care services in Ireland. HIQA’s mandate to date extends across a specified range of public, private and voluntary sector services. HIQA’s role is to develop standards, inspect and review health and social care services and support informed decisions on how services are delivered.

In 2023, HIQA, in conjunction with the Department of Health and the HSE, set out the critical components needed to standardise health information in Ireland including the collaborative setting of health information standards and the development of a programme to maintain these standards.

Key to achieving standards that are fit for purpose and in line with national and international requirements, HIQA sought specialist training and advice from PRSB. PRSB has the experience and expertise to provide relevant training, advice and artefacts that will strengthen HIQA’s health information standards setting function.

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Aims and objectives

HIQA is seeking the provision of an external training and advice service from the PRSB to provide the following deliverables over three phases during 2025:

  • Explanation of how projects are delivered, including a detailed introduction to PRSB’s methodology and lessons learnt from project delivery.
  • Application of the methodology in practice and tools PRSB use, including information modelling tools and artefacts.
  • Products developed and published by PRSB.
  • Clinical safety considerations.
  • Explanation of endorsement and benefits, and how this could be applied in Ireland.
  • Demonstration of architecture, modelling tools and outputs for suppliers.
  • Illustration of the relationship between PRSB standards and EU standards.
  • Support and maintenance of standards – how it works, queries and resolutions, governance and clinical input.
  • Coordination and oversight of shadowing opportunities for team members on specific programmes of work.
    Conformance assessment tools and methodology.
 
If you would like to learn more about this project or discuss ways to get involved, please contact us at info@theprsb.org.
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Better records for better care

Personalised care and support planning for people with severe mental illness

A review of a sample of current care plans, and the way they have been developed, may be helpful in identifying the priorities for this improvement. The PRSB Implementation Guide provides more detailed explanations about each element of the plan, including advice on how the planning process might be best conducted.
These questions might form a checklist for current plans to be compared with. 

1. Does the plan include an About Me section in which the service user, in their own words, can indicate the information they want to be available about their lives, their values, their interests, and priorities, available for all those who may care for them?
2. Is the approach to developing a care plan patient centred and engaging, allowing plans to be based on patient priorities goals, and aspirations, along with the actions they plan to take and the support that they will receive?
3. Is there space for a “formulation” to be recorded in which the person receiving care and the professionals who provide it, share and record the personal meaning and the origins of the person’s difficulties?
4. Are relevant procedures and therapies recorded?
5. Where relevant, are one or more contingency plans included for anticipatable disruptions, exacerbations, or deterioration, and do they include advice on what to do and points of contact for those called upon to respond?
6. Where relevant are additional supporting plans incorporated, (an example being an “educational and health plan” for someone with a neurodevelopment disorder)
7. Is a version of the plan available to a service user (if they wish to have it) in a form and format that they can understand and find to be of value?
8. How is a version of the plan available to the GP and other key parts of the health and care system?

Work conducted by PRSB and partners recently has looked specifically at the suitability of this approach to the development and documentation of care and support plans for people with Severe Mental Illness. This resulted in an updated version of the standard (v1.4), for use by any service and for any group of service users, but with some modifications to ensure that it meets the needs of this community. The approach to a patient centred process of identifying goals, hopes, and values, and the support needed to achieve them, is fully compatible with and can be conducted using, specific tools in use in mental health, such as DIALOG, DIALOG+, and ReQoL, for example. 

Where analysis indicates the need for improvement in the content and process of personalised care and support planning for patients with Severe Mental Illness, specific improvement projects should be instituted to co-design with service users and their representatives, and the relevant staff groups, new approaches, and documentation that would be of value in delivering improvement. The toolkit includes a range of existing resources that could be used to engage in this improvement work, including signposting to relevant existing approaches informed by patient experience-based design.

Moving to a single holistic plan

A review of a sample of current care plans, and the way they have been developed, may be helpful in identifying the priorities for this improvement. The PRSB Implementation Guide provides A key development, consistent with national policy on support for Personalised Care across all health and care sectors, is the move towards an individual with complex needs having a single, integrated, care plan, rather than a series of plans developed by different parts of the health and social care system in isolation of one another. For a patient with severe mental illness, the related concerns and challenges might form a very prominent part of such an integrated plan; many will also have concurrent health challenges and needs. The intention is that the relevant services work together to plan and wrap support around the patient and their family in an integrated way, rather than as a series of sequential or disconnected encounters in which the service user or their friends and family have to adopt the role of the integrator.

A starting point would be to agree priority groups of service users who may already have more than one care plan because they need care from more than one part of the system of health and social care. This could be initiated by looking at service users registered with some sentinel practices or PCNs. Alternatively, the approach might focus initially on people with defined co-morbidity or risk that entails collaborative care with agencies beyond specialist mental health services.

The focus here is on the process of care planning and agreement on what should be shared, rather than solely on the technology used;

1. What is the process to agree which professional will initiate care planning and act as the “lead point of contact” for the service user?
2. Will initial plans be agreed with the service user in joint consultations or sequentially? Where and how will they be conducted?
3. What will be the process to agree the elements of the plans which should be available to professionals and potential authorised users beyond the immediate care teams, (A&E services, Ambulance Services, Social services, etc.) with the service user’s consent?
4. How will elements of the plan be updated following consultations in a way which is proportionate, to allow contact and progress notes to be maintained by the service conducting the consultation, whilst avoiding unnecessary work for partners in care if there is no significant change to the personalised care and support plan?
5. What are the implications for workload, logistics, and administration arising out of these decisions?

The answers to these questions and others will best be elicited through focused joint working, grounded in real, or at least realistic examples. This will entail process mapping, and co-design with a range of professionals, service users, and families. Resources from the toolkit and outputs from the Simulation element of this project will be valuable. Some organisations would adopt an approach such as a Rapid Process Improvement Workshop, planned over several weeks and conducted over a number of sequential days, to develop prototype ways of working that could be tested in the field.