Latest news

Stay up to date with our latest news and gain insights into our work and the wider industry on this page.

Skeldur

We’re delighted to welcome Skedulr as our latest partner. Their cloud-based care management platform supports domiciliary care providers in delivering safe, efficient and person centred care. Skeldur brings together key operational areas such as rostering,

We are delighted to announce that CACI is our latest Quality Partner to achieve conformance with the Personalised Care and Support Plan Standard for its Certa Care Management System. This means care providers using Certa

The National Commission into the Regulation of AI in Healthcare brings together global AI leaders, clinicians and regulators to advise on AI regulation in healthcare. The Commission aims to support the development of a new regulatory

AI

AI experts and clinicians came together for a PRSB partner event exploring how standards can support the safe and effective use of clinical AI across the NHS. The session, Standards in clinical AI: Aligning innovation

Leapmind now conformant

  We’re pleased to announce that our partner Leapmind-iStaffRota has achieved PRSB conformance against the Personalised Care and Support Plan (PCSP) and About Me standards. We spoke with CEO Andre Disso to mark the occasion

The Professional Record Standards Body (PRSB) and NHS England (NHSE) recognise and value the significant contributions of clinicians, professionals, people, and key health and care stakeholders from across the country in supporting the development of

health check news

PRSB has been commissioned by the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) to help define who should be invited for an NHS Health Check. This builds on our previous work developing an information standard

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

Leapmind

We’re excited to welcome Leapmind as our newest PRSB partner and to collaborate with their team on standards conformance for their iStaffRota platform. We recently spoke with them to learn more about their priorities and

eye care

PRSB has joined a coalition of leading organisations calling for urgent national standardisation of electronic health records (EHRs) in eye care. A new position statement published by The Royal College of Ophthalmologists emphasises that standardised

  As the health and care sector moves towards a more data-driven future, our members have shared their perspectives on the recently published 10-year plan. Their feedback highlights key opportunities, current successes to build on,

Partner welcome CareApps

  We’re delighted to welcome CareApps as a new PRSB partner and look forward to working with their team on standards conformance for their software platform, Empathika. We spoke with them to learn more about

PARTNER announcement

We are delighted to welcome our new partner, Health Connect, to the Standards Partnership Scheme.  The Standards Partnership Scheme connects health and social care digital system suppliers with PRSB, to accelerate the adoption of PRSB

Diabetes image

Young people with Type 1 diabetes are playing a central role in shaping how their health information could be recorded and shared in the future, thanks to a pioneering pilot project by DigiBete using the

image of nurse and woman

    The idea of a Single Patient Record (SPR) is not new, but today, it feels closer to becoming a reality than ever before. As the healthcare sector undergoes sweeping digital transformation, the vision

Spotlight on: Oliver Lake

We sat down with Oliver Lake, PRSB’s new Transition CEO, to ask him a few questions about his experience, what drives him, and a bit about life outside of work. What initially drew you to

Health and care data

In an ever-evolving digital and policy landscape, PRSB’s Members and Partners continue to face both persistent challenges and emerging opportunities in health and care data. We’ve gathered insights into the key issues shaping their work

Oliver Lake

The Professional Record Standards Body (PRSB) has announced the appointment of Oliver Lake as its new Transition Chief Executive Officer. He will officially take up the role in April 2025. As an experienced leader with

Having a blood test

Shared care records help ensure that our health and care information, including medications, allergies, test results, can be easily accessed by different health and care organisations, resulting in more connected care. An accessible, more joined-up

With over 1.2 million NHS Health Check appointments taking place each year, it is vital that this prevention initiative is delivering positive outcomes for population health. Health Diagnostics help their clients – often local councils

Cartoon image of a group of people

We’re delighted to announce that we’ve been chosen to lead a consultation for NHS England to explore how person characteristics are used in clinical decision making and improve how they are recorded in care records.

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.