The Care Database looks to the PRSB’s standards to demonstrate their commitment to safe care delivery

The Care Database, an all-in-one care management platform specialising in the children’s respite and hospice sectors, is now a PRSB partner.

With over 25 years of solution expertise, The Care Database helps the community of care experts provide physical, emotional, social, and spiritual support to children, young adults and their families, across different settings and during the many phases of their lives.

The Care Database feels that the new partnership with PRSB will lead to a higher profile of specialists in the development of standards. By joining the Standards Partnership Scheme, it will move specialist suppliers more quickly towards interoperability in the sharing of people’s information ultimately to improve their care.

Our new partner strongly believes that achieving conformance against our standards will also help strengthen their brand as market leaders, and that the PRSB’s Quality Mark will help them demonstrate their commitment to safe care delivery. The company is also looking forward to benefiting from our workshops, which offer a chance to learn more about information standards and connect with clinical experts and other system suppliers.

Looking ahead, The Care Database will be interested in going through the conformance assessment against the About Me Standard and the Palliative and End of Life Care Information Standard as they are both key to children’s palliative care.

Polly Esplen, Managing Director at The Care Database, said: “We are glad to be a PRSB partner. We are committed to delivering our promise of consistent and safe data to support our clients in providing the highest quality of care. We look forward to adopting the information standards and to a future where we can integrate with other healthcare systems.”

Lorraine Foley, PRSB’s CEO, said: “I am delighted to welcome The Care Database as our new partner and am pleased that their goals strongly align with those of the PRSB – delivering high-quality care by adopting information standards and achieving interoperability. Our assessment team will be pleased to support The Care Database in becoming conformant against our standards.”

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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;

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.”