Views from professionals, patients, our partners, the public and industry on next steps for improving records.

Blogs

  By Dr Colin Dunkley, Paediatric Consultant and Clinical Lead, Epilepsy12 Audit, RCPCH For over a decade, many have been working to

This month, we spoke to Dr Steve Bentley, a recently retired GP with a long-standing passion for improving patient care through better

As of today, 26 digital health and care system suppliers have met the PRSB’s Personalised Care and Support Plan Standard, enabling thousands

A single patient record has the potential to transform the way health and social care work together in the UK. It represents

A blog by Kate Colborne-Baber, Programme Director – Care Management, at Person Centred Software  Millions of interactions between service users, care staff

As a clinician, researcher and the new Chair of the Professional Record Standards Body, I know that to truly enable the Government’s

By Chandu Wickramarachchi, Chief Clinical Information Officer (CCIO) at Epro In our lifetimes, we encounter many different healthcare settings at different points

By Lorraine Foley, CEO at the PRSB 2023-24 has been an incredible year of growth for us at PRSB, filled with achievements

At times, it seems that the world is full of controversy and disagreement, but often, there is more consensus than one might

A blog from co-written with our partner, HD Labs In this year’s budget, the Government pledged an additional £3.4bn to ramp up

Nicola Cranfield, Clinical Solutions Lead and CSO at IMS MAXIMS, explains why other system suppliers should follow their example and become conformant

  Our CEO, Lorraine Foley, reflects on our 10th anniversary event on 21 September. On 21 September, having succumbed to COVID, I

Sandra Baughan, Founder and Managing Director at Quic, currently enabling better management of diabetes through the development of digital care planning for

With the recent publication of Scotland’s first Data strategy for Health and Social Care, Carol Sinclair, Chair of the Health and Social

A blog by Dr Kath Lambert, Consultant in Palliative Medicine at Harrogate and District NHS Foundation Trust  We will all experience death

A guest blog by Ben Wilson, Product Solution Director at Orion Health. The NHS defines population health as ‘an approach aimed at

Today’s health and care is a team effort. Ensuring any member of a person’s care team can access the latest information about

A guest blog from Katie Thorn, Project Lead at Digital Social Care While we are experiencing greater appetite for the use of

The way we share and store our health and care information can directly impact the delivery of care plans and their outcomes.

A guest blog from James Sanderson, Director of Community Health and Personalised Care at NHS England. When we look back over the

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.”