Members' reflections on the 10-year plan: Opportunities, priorities, and the role of PRSB

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As the health and care sector moves towards a more data-driven future, our members have shared their perspectives on the recently published 10-year plan. Their feedback highlights key opportunities, current successes to build on, and crucial priorities to ensure meaningful progress. Here is a summary of the key themes raised:

 

Unlocking opportunities through data

Members identified significant opportunities in the 10-year plan to improve health and care through better data use. Central to this is joining up data silos and enabling seamless information flow across organisations and sectors. This would support:

  • Integrated care, particularly through multidisciplinary teams (MDTs)
  • Neighbourhood working, with standardised data tailored for each professional to provide optimal care
  • Improved data quality for research and care planning
  • Linking pathways of care with outcomes, including experience measures
  • Enhanced user experience, making it easier to input and access data

 

The use of AI and large language models to structure narrative data, the focus on digital transformation, and investment in data standards were seen as highly positive.

The expansion of wearable technology, support for patient access to their own records, and the development of the Single Patient Record (SPR) were also highlighted as transformative, with members expressing a desire to be deeply involved through PRSB’s networks in the design and delivery of the solution.

 

 

Building on existing successes

Members pointed to existing achievements that can serve as strong foundations for accelerating the plan’s implementation:

  • The NHS App and Shared Care Record and the Core Information Standard (CIS) were frequently cited as effective tools that should be enhanced and scaled.
  • Standards such as CIS, Personalised Care and Support Planning, and About Me Standard were seen as invaluable to continue to develop and further implementation
  • The growing public acceptance of digital-first services was recognised as a cultural shift that supports wider adoption.

Members agreed that learning from areas already ahead in implementation and continuing to develop secure data environments will be key to future progress.

 

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Priorities for the Single Patient Record (SPR)

The Single Patient Record was viewed as essential to delivering joined-up care, particularly for people with long-term or complex needs. Key priorities include:

  • Involving professional and patient ‘users’ of the SPR early on in its development to ensure it is useful, usable and used
  • Embedding the Core Information and About Me standards
  • Creating personalised care and support plans, co-produced with patients and spanning all sectors (NHS, local authority, community)
  • Incorporating mental health, social care, and underserved groups (e.g. those in military, prison, or homeless populations)
  • Addressing proxy access issues for carers
  • Ensuring the system is flexible, usable, and audit-ready, supporting outcome tracking and clinical registries
  • Learning from the Shared Care Record programme and incorporating tools such as the Patient Flags API

Transformation at the speed of trust – there was a strong consensus that without attention to information governance (IG) and public confidence in data sharing frameworks, the SPR would struggle to deliver its full value.

 

Gaps in the 10-Year Plan

While members broadly welcomed the plan’s ambitions, they felt it lacked a concrete implementation roadmap. They called for:

  • A clear delivery plan with defined roles, responsibilities, and timelines including how PRSB’s members would be engaged through implementation
  • Clarity on funding flows and accountability
  • Immediate focus on quick wins that can be delivered before the next general election
  • Stronger integration of social care and other public services into the vision

 

How PRSB can support the sector?

Looking ahead, members see PRSB playing a vital role in turning the 10-year vision into reality. They suggested PRSB should:

  • Facilitate collaboration across the four nations with NHS England, supporting opportunities for acceleration based on best practice
  • Continue supporting electronic patient record (EPR) development for standardised data
  • Further evaluation and real-world case studies showing benefits of using standards
  • Advocate for professionals and prevent top-down imposition of data systems that do not address their needs
  • Convene stakeholders to support implementation and drive alignment
  • Champion a shared understanding of what “good” looks like

This member feedback provides a rich, grounded insight into the health and care sector’s ambitions and expectations. As PRSB continues to support and shape the national approach, the collective voice of our members will remain critical in guiding action and ensuring that data delivers on its promise to improve care for all.

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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.”