Our CEO, Lorraine Foley, reflects on our 10th anniversary event on 21 September.

On 21 September, having succumbed to COVID, I was relegated to watching our Annual General Meeting and 10^th anniversary celebrations on a small screen from afar. I was disappointed as there was obviously such a great vibe in the room and a good party clearly got underway quickly in King’s Cross once the formalities were over.

The power of face-to-face, real conversations with real people cannot be under-estimated and the spark and inspiration of human interaction and creativity is very hard, if not impossible, to emulate virtually. PRSB brings together such a diverse mix of people from different backgrounds, professions and experiences that it can’t fail to be interesting when we all meet up and I am quite certain many new links and connections were made and minds opened to new perspectives.  

Sam Goncalves, once again, stole the show with heart-warming tales of her son Shane and the positive, life-changing impact for him when the many professionals involved in his care have insight into how Shane wants his care to be – this is what personalised care really means to me and I’d recommend taking a couple of minutes to watch this short film to understand how different care could be.

Besides being an excuse for a party, there was a serious point behind celebrating the last 10 years since PRSB was first created as a UK wide, independent community interest company on the recommendation of the Department for Health and Social Care, the Academy of Medical Royal Colleges and NHS Digital. It is interesting to think that no small part of their motivation was the perceived shortcomings of the National Programme for IT, just a few years before with the lack of involvement at scale of those most directly affected by digitisation (front-line professionals and people), being a key determinant of the programme’s ultimate demise. That principle is as true today as it was 10 years ago and it’s vital that we learn from our shared history – I hope and trust we are all getting better at that, but the temptation to think a ‘technical fix’ will do the job, without paying sufficient attention to the people, culture and process changes that must happen with any transformative change, will continue to deliver the same disappointing results. 

Managing to survive for 10 years is no mean feat for a small, start-up organisation with limited financial reserves, trying to carve out its place in turbulent waters. I am convinced that we’ve prevailed by sticking to our principles – people at the centre of our work, uniquely bringing together all the professions that must be at the forefront of saying what data is needed and how it should be used. 

The event was a great opportunity to reconnect with old friends and allies – John Farenden, Ann Slee, Reecha Sofat, Keith Strahan, Peter Skinner, Ian Townend and Carol Sinclair with a birthday message from Scotland (the list goes on), all of whom have played pivotal roles in our history and helped us come so far and we are truly grateful to them. Great to hear of so many new connections made, leaders who will no doubt challenge us and help us on our way.

Saffron Cordery, Deputy Chief Executive of NHS Providers and our key-note speaker, caught the mood of the room perfectly – the pressure on the NHS and social care has never been so severe. But with true Dunkirk spirit, there was a unifying belief in the room in the power of digital and standardised data, done well, could really make inroads into this problem. Our Deputy CEO and Chief Operating Officer, Oliver Lake, made the point powerfully in his address that our eye is firmly on accelerating the adoption of standards and doing all we can to support others to do so, delivering real improvements to  outcomes and benefit to the system. I hope that we can unite all our talents (PRSB, our members, our Partners and other organisations who share our aims) to make sure it happens.

A special thanks to our fantastic sponsors who made the event possible – Sitekit, Answer Digital, InterSystems, Orion Health and Healthcare Innovation Consortium. It is great to see thought leaders like these leading the field and helping make interoperable data a reality.

And here’s to the next decade – I may not be around for PRSB’s next milestone birthday, but I’m confident the organisation will achieve even more in the years ahead, evolving and changing how we develop, use and implement standards drawing on new talents, new ideas and new technologies and that’s as it should be.