Latest views from our bloggers

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

Blogs

Meet our Service User Representative: Siobhean McCarthy-Perham  

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July 6, 2026

Siobhean McCarthy-Perham   Service User Voice Representative PRSB Assurance Committee Can you tell us a bit about your role as a Service User Representative? 

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Personalised care in practice: a health and wellbeing coach’s perspective

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March 13, 2026

Personalised care works best when information is connected and visible across all services supporting a person, including their GP, hospital teams, community

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Improving epilepsy care using data standards

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October 22, 2025

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

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Spotlight on: Dr Steve Bentley, Clinical Lead at PRSB

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July 30, 2025

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

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CareDocs on a mission to help deliver personalised care with their latest PRSB conformance achievement

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March 28, 2025

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

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Building a single patient record: the three pillars of success

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March 7, 2025

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

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Understanding the power of data in transforming social care

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January 14, 2025

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

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High-quality data: the foundation on which to build the NHS’s 10-year plan

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December 5, 2024

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

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Improving outpatient communications with standardised letters – how Epro is doing this

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October 2, 2024

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

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PRSB’s year of progress: Accelerating standards adoption for better care

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September 19, 2024

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

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Navigating the data frontier – how can we accelerate the digital progress in health and care?

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June 13, 2024

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

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How will standards keep AI safe in the NHS?

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March 28, 2024

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

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Empowering efficient and connected care with the PRSB e-Discharge Summary Standard

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September 29, 2023

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

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10 years of driving better health and care outcomes with information standards

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September 26, 2023

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

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How can better information sharing between health and care settings improve diabetes care?

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July 13, 2023

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

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Scotland’s data strategy aims to set the standard

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June 22, 2023

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

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The importance of sharing information about people’s needs and wishes in palliative and end of life care

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March 23, 2023

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

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Improving population health management through data and individualised care

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March 7, 2023

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

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Orion Health’s journey to become the first supplier conformant against PRSB’s Core Information Standard 

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February 7, 2023

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

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Data changes lives – how information-sharing and recording can help transform social care

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January 27, 2023

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

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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.