PRSB exhibited across both days of the Health Plus Care Show, and took the opportunity to launch the #CareAboutMe campaign. Following a rush of social media activity, attendees made their way over to PRSB’s stand to share their About Me story and find out more about how the standard can help them. You can watch professionals and suppliers sharing their thoughts on the campaign here.

The Health Plus Care Show, a multi-strand event, took place in the ExCeL London on 18 and 19 May, with keynote speeches from leaders in the digital health space, including Simon Bolton. The agenda was expansive, with several themes including the technology and innovation, digital transformation and integrated care.

We also led on two speaking sessions. PRSB social prescribing lead and Link Worker, Sarah Moreton, kicked things off on the Wednesday with her talk on the evolution of the social prescribing standard and its importance to the profession. She explained that social prescribing is highlighted in the NHS Long Term Plan as being essential for accelerating the provision of personalised care, but this can only happen if the data collected is structured and standardised for easy use by Link Workers. Using the standard not only helps deliver personalised care but also supports joined-up care across service providers and produces research ready information that can be used for taking action on inequalities.

Later that day, the PRSB data and analytics panel took to the stage to give attendees their perspectives on how data analytics is improving prevention, prediction and treatment in health care. Hosted by PRSB Chair, Professor Maureen Baker CBE, PRSB Clinical Director, Dr Nilesh Bharakhada, was joined by Owner of Ramsey Systems, Charlie McCay, and Barts Research Data Scientist, Sophie Williams, to share their expertise.

Charlie was the first to highlight the importance of standards for structuring data and making it ready for exploration and research. He explained that a person’s data needs to be available wherever they interact with the system, rather than just at their GP, which is why need a framework of standards so this data can be transferred, viewed and then meaningfully used for analysis.

Sophie and Nilesh then shared two case studies where structured data had supported good analysis. Sophie stated that Barts have created a standardised data set for COVID-19 information data set that has been used to flag diversity issues in covid trials and Nilesh said that by using structured diabetes data, GPs across North West London have been able to spot poor performance on check-ups and level up services accordingly.