About Me Standard

About Me Standard

About Me information is the most important details that a person wants to share with professionals in health and social care. This information might include how best to communicate with the person, how to help them feel at ease or details about how they like to take their medication. This standard outlines how About Me information should be documented and shared in health and care records.

On this page

Current release

Version: v2.01
> Standard model – Json
> Standard model – Excel
> Standard model – PRSB viewer
> Supporting documentation (external link to NHS Standards Directory)

From 01 January 2026, this standard will be owned and managed by NHS England and is made available for reuse or amendment under the Open Government Licence v3.0 (OGL 3.0). A review of the ongoing requirement for this standard will be undertaken by NHS England. Details on this and any update to the standard will be published on the NHS Standards Directory. If you have any questions or feedback relating to this standard, please email: england.standards.assurance@nhs.net.

 

About this standard

Using About Me information has been shown to achieve huge benefits for people including supporting them through hospital appointments or other care which might not have been possible or resulted in adverse outcomes without understanding key ways to work with the person.

The standard is structured to help both professionals find the information about the person quickly and help people to structure the information they wish to share.

Watch Shane’s moving story to find out how important the right information is for good care and how it can keep people well and out of hospital.

Conformant partners

The following Partners have successfully achieved conformance against the About Me Standard.

Conformant PartnerConformant SystemVersion conformant withLevel attainedValid until


Access Group
www.theaccessgroup.com
.		Access Care PlanningVersion 1.2330.07.2027


Access Group
www.theaccessgroup.com
.		Access Care and Clinical V9.40Version 1.2315/08/2027
Anchor app
AnchorApp
anchorapp.co.uk/		AnchorAppVersion 1.2331/07/2028
birdie logo
Birdie Care
www.birdie.care
.		BirdieVersion 1.2322.03.2027



CACI
www.caci.co.uk
.		Certa Care Management SystemVersion 1.2309.01.2028


Carebeans
www.carebeans.co.uk
.		Dom-Care SystemVersion 1.2315.09.2026


Careberry
www.careberry.com


.		Careberry Software V1.2.2.4Version 1.2312.08.2027
Care Control systems

Care Control Systems
carecontrolsystems.co.uk
.		Electronic Care Planning SystemVersion 1.2321.12.2026


Care Management Systems Ltd
www.caredocs.co.uk

.		Care Docs V1.0Version 1.2312.08.2027



Care Vision 
www.carevisioncms.co.uk

Care Vision CMS V3 601Version 1.2315.02.2026

CLL-full-logo-RGB@0.75x

CareLineLive 
carelinelive.com

CareLineLive

Version 1.2309.03.2027



Cura Advances Technologies
cura.systems

Cura version 4.43.0

Version 1.2308.03.2027

Dom Portal logo

Dom Portal
www.domportal.care/

Dom Portal Version 2.9

Version 1.2325.03.2027

Everylife

everyLIFE Technologies
www.everylifetechnologies.com

Web release version 1.179Version 1.2203.04.2027



Fusion eCare Solutions 
fusionecare.com

Fusion eCare SystemVersion 1.2315.03.2027

Graphnet

Graphnet Health
www.graphnethealth.com

Graphnet Health SystemVersion 1.2301.05.2026
Health Connect

Health Connect
https://www.health-connect.com/		Health ConnectVersion 2.1309.07.2028

iStaffrota

Leapmind-iStaffrota

www.istaffrota.com

 

IStaffrotaVersion 1.2304.11.2028



KareInn
kareinn.com

KareInn Digital Care Management Version 1.1.3Version 1.2308.08.2027


Leecare Solutions
www.leecare.co.uk

Platinum 6Version 1.2311.03.2027



Log My Care
www.logmycare.co.uk

Care Management Platform 3.10.5Version 1.2318.01.2026

logo-mpft

Midlands Partnership NHS Foundation Trust
www.mpft.nhs.uk

Local implementation of Access Rio v. 23.04.01Version 1.2321.03.2027

Nourish Care Systems Limited
www.nourishcare.co.uk

Nourish SystemVersion 1.2320.03.2027


Orion Health
www.orionhealth.com

Orion Health Care Pathways v2.2xVersion 1.2318.07.2025

OneAdvanced logo
OneAdvanced

www.oneadvanced.com

OneAdvanced – Care Management SystemVersion 1.2331.03.2029

One touch health logo


One Touch Health
http://www.onetouchealth.net/

One TouchVersion 1.2328.03.2027


Person Centred Software
personcentredsoftware.com

Electronic Care Planning SystemVersion 1.0302.05.2027

qwikify logo dark txt white bg


Qwikify
www.qwikify.com

V3.0

Version 1.2308.03.2027
Rix
RIX		Multi MeVersion 1.2308.10.2027

Roundsys Ltd   
RoundSys. The Care Management System. Great support. CQC compliant.		Roundsys V1.0Version 1.2324/10/2027

Sumo Optimus Ltd 
https://www.soscaremanagementsystems.com/		SOS Care Management SystemVersion 1.2301/08/2027

Storii Care
https://www.storiicare.com/		Storii Care Management Platform Version release 52Version 1.2323/07/2027

Case studies

These case studies highlight the real benefits of using About Me for both individuals and professionals.

Man smiling into camera

Endorsement

This standard has been endorsed by the following organisations:

  • British Association for Music Therapy
  • British Dietetic Association
  • British Geriatrics Society
  • British Psychological Society
  • Care Provider Alliance
  • Care Software Providers Association (CASPA)
  • Chartered Society of Physiotherapy
  • Compassion in Dying
  • Health and Social Care Alliance Scotland
  • Institute of Health Records and Information Management
  • Local Government Association
  • Royal College of Emergency Medicine
  • Royal College of General Practitioners
  • Royal College of Nursing
  • Royal College of Occupational Therapists
  • Royal College of Physicians
  • Royal Pharmaceutical Society

 

PRSB define endorsement as the public declaration by legitimate stakeholder organisations that that they support a standard, are aware of its purpose, benefit and development methodology, and will promote and encourage the use of the standard to their members, supported by the PRSB.

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.”

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;

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.