We entered 2021 in lockdown at the height of the second wave of the pandemic, with the health and social care sector working tirelessly to keep us safe. Despite these difficulties, we’ve also had notable successes this year with the mass rollout of the vaccination programme and at PRSB we are immensely proud that our Community Pharmacy Standard supported the covid and flu vaccination programmes, and the childhood and adult immunisation programmes. Find out more about our key achievements for this year.

1. Shared Decision-making standard: We launched our shared decision-making project this year and have now published a draft version of the standard. Shared decision making is a collaborative process where the clinician and person consider treatment options together so that the person can make the right decision for themselves. Our standard captures the information from these sessions and makes it digitally transferrable.

2. Personalised Care and Support Planning Standard: The PRSB worked with professionals and people who use services to update our care planning standard to meet the requirements of those with a severe mental health condition. The PRSB worked with early implementer in London and South Yorkshire to develop a toolkit to support adoption, available soon. This month, the standard received ISN status by the NHS Data Alliance Partnership Board. This ensures the standard is implemented across the sector.

3. New services added to the Community Pharmacy Standard: In recent years, the role of community pharmacists has expanded and they now offer an increasing range of services. As such, it is important that pharmacists can digitally record people’s information and share efficiently with GP practices, which is exactly what PRSB’s community pharmacy standard does. This year, we published a draft update to this standard, covering 13 pharmacy standards and in 2022, we will publish a further update so that the standard can be adapted to cover new services as they are introduced.

4. Standards in action: PRSB’s information standards are only as good as they are usable. In August, we did a deep dive into three cases where our standards are being used in practice to support joined-up care. From our standards being used to record COVID-19 vaccinations to our social care standards being used to digitise care home residents’ personal preferences, PRSB standards are being adopted to support better, safer care. 2021 saw the main GP IT system suppliers and acute and mental health hospitals transfer data seamlessly from hospitals to primary care using PRSB’s transfer of care standards and FHIR profiles. Some 300,000 discharges in Leeds, Devon, Dorset and Oxfordshire are now being transferred using PRSB standards and FHIR with full rollout expected in 2022. This is an important milestone as continuity of care, particularly for frail and vulnerable people, depends hugely on fast and efficient flows of key clinical information in discharge summaries.