A surge in conformances with PRSB standards will help accelerate the delivery of personalised care

Standards can only make an impact if they are used on a large scale. With 18 solutions now conformant with the Personalised Care and Support Plan Standard and another 10 in progress of conformance, the widespread use of standards is becoming a reality. With these conformant systems reaching around 30,000 users of care services, the delivery of personalised care is also becoming a norm.  

Recently, three conformant solutions started on this course of change by implementing the PRSB’s Personalised Care and Support Plan Standard and the About Me Standard, CareLineLive, Fusion eCare Solutions and Qwikify want to support health and care professionals in more efficient and effective care planning by enabling them to record and share information on people’s unique needs, goals, and preferences in a standardised way.

Conformance with standards opens the door to interoperability between systems. However, interoperability is a team effort. System suppliers need to be on the same page to make it happen – and that is where standards adoption comes in. Implementing standards will result in information flowing to everyone involved in the person’s care, allowing for continuity of care across care settings, so that people don’t have to repeat their story and carry paper notes with them. This is why we are excited to see what benefits for the wider health and care system the surge in our partners’ conformances will bring.

Sean Orrell, Product Manager at CareLineLive, said “We are very pleased to be the first supplier to achieve the highest level of conformance with the Personalised Care and Support Plan Standard including ‘About Me’ at level 3 on our first attempt. We are proud to be able to provide our customers with the best possible care planning functionality, which ultimately leads to delivering the best quality of care possible. We look forward to seeing how our customers interact with these new capabilities and how this will drive care delivery.

“We found the conformance process to be simple and intuitive. From the moment the conformance pack was shared with us, our assessment team (Ian and Isabel) were on hand to provide any guidance or clarification. In addition, Becky was always at the other end of the phone should we need it.”

Ben Richardson, Business Strategy and Marketing Manager at Fusion eCare Solutions, said: “Having previously worked with the PRSB on our About Me conformance, we were eager to get back to work with the team once again. We are honoured to have worked with such enthusiastic professionals at the PRSB who were readily available for meetings, provided clear guidance on implementation and suggestions for improvement every step of the journey.

“Our adherence to the Personalised Care and Support Plan Standard reflects our organisational ethos of placing individuals at the forefront of our care initiatives. We have not only met the requirements set by the PRSB but have also elevated the standard of care, possible by our NHS assured digital social care records. This milestone proves our dedication to enhancing the well-being of those we serve and all individuals in care.”

Khaled Gamiet, Founder at Qwikify, commented: “We are very pleased to be partnering with the PRSB and becoming conformant with the Personalised Care and Support Plan Standard and ‘About Me’.  Our focus has been on providing customers with a digital platform that offers tangible benefits in terms of time saving and helping staff write better care plans. By working with the PRSB, our customers now have the assurance that our platform conforms to a recognised standard.

“The PRSB Assessors were very helpful and supportive throughout the process. Qwikify has taken an innovative approach to digital care planning and the PRSB Assessors work with us to understand how our platform works in applying the Standards.”

Lorraine Foley, PRSB’s CEO, added: “Huge congratulations to our Quality Partners, CareLineLive, Fusion eCare Solutions and Qwikify, for working so hard and achieving conformance with our standards. Your successes bring people and professionals closer to achieving personalised care and interoperability, and show that adopting standards is possible, and should be considered by other system suppliers as a gateway to meeting their customers’ needs and helping them deliver excellent care.”

To be listed on the adult social care procurement framework, health and care providers are now required to show full compliance with the Personalised Care and Support Plan Standard, and system suppliers will need to enable them to meet the deadline. If you haven’t already implemented the standard in your system, contact partners@theprsb.org to discuss how we can support you in doing so.

Read more news
Read more blogs

Successful teams have the functional skills to lead a task, benefit from diversity, and are led in a way that creates time and space for reflection; the ability to take stock periodically, of the task and of the way in which the team is engaged in delivering it. Your stakeholder analysis [HYPERLINK] should help you assemble the most appropriate team and identify how the team interacts and relates to other stakeholders like sponsors, services users, etc.

The variation in the size, both in terms of population served and numbers of constituent organisations, and of complexity, between Integrated Care Systems, precludes the possibility of any prescriptive guidance on the way in which this team is assembled.

Engeström’s expansive learning cycle of learning actions explains how there are 7 stages of learning actions;

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.”