PRSB enjoyed record attendance at this year’s Annual General Meeting and our focus on person-centred care and standards into action proved popular. Our speakers included leading clinicians and people who use services who advocated for standards and the impact they are having on improving care, and attendees heard about the great strides PRSB’s Standards Partnership Scheme has made this year.

Following a warm welcome from our Chair, Professor Maureen Baker CBE, NHSX Chief Nursing Officer, Natasha Phillips, kicked things off with the keynote speech on building a digitally enabled nursing workforce. She explained that as one third of the healthcare workforce, nurses are critically positioned to enable digital-led care and face the current challenge of spending 45% of their time on administrative tasks, time that could be reduced by using digital technologies, giving nurses more time to care. Natasha also reflected on the importance of a nursing records standard for delivering interoperability and rich data that ‘will enable us to advance practice and, importantly in operational terms, evidence and seek resources for nursing’.

Emma Robertson, who is co-leading the nursing record project from a user perspective, spoke movingly about her personal experience with the healthcare system as a cancer patient and the importance of person-centred care. By being more involved in decisions about her medical care, Emma explained that she could help prevent mistakes and help to create her care plans, documenting personal details and preferences that are crucial to her treatment. While acknowledging that nurses are good at person-centred care, Emma said that the information they collect isn’t always transferred to the relevant teams and a nursing standard can capture and disseminate the holistic assessments nurses do.

‘I hope you realise that I’m not just a patient, that I have some expertise in my own health care needs, and that if I am made to feel included in my care, I can be a supportive partner and a fierce advocate for all of the professionals I’m involved with’ – Emma Robertson

PRSB’s Chief Executive, Lorraine Foley, gave an update on our progress in the past year – building our clinical and professional membership and groups representing people who use services and engaging them in a range of successful standards development projects across health and social care. She focused on our work on the Personalised Care and Support Plan and the About Me standard that are fundamental to integrated care for individuals. And she spoke about PRSB’s focus on implementation of standards and our new Standards Partnership Scheme working with system suppliers to build support for embedding standards in systems and our Quality Partner offer that assesses supplier’s conformance to PRSB standards. Our ambition is to extend the scheme to local care providers soon. Looking ahead, social care remains a priority for the PRSB and Lorraine congratulated CASPA on becoming a member this year. Similarly, PRSB was pleased to see more input in our work from all four nations than ever before.

‘As we continue to expand our library of operational and clinical information standards in Wales, links with the work of the PRSB are vital to ensure consistency in approaches and interoperability across the four UK nations’ – Paul Mason, Information Standards Management Lead, Digital Health and Care Wales.

The shared decision-making panel was up next and Lawrence Mudford, who co-led the project as a user of services, PRSB Clinical Executive, Nilesh Bharakhada and consultant vascular surgeon, Mr James Brown, highlighted the success and importance of PRSB’s shared decision-making project. The project aimed to develop a clear and comprehensive record of shared decision-making conversations between a person and their clinician. The result of shared decision-making, Lawrence said, is that people feel empowered ‘to own their own illness’ and it gives people choice and permission to reach decisions based on an understanding of the benefits, risks and alternatives.

All three speakers agreed that the recording of this process embedded discussions, allowing for reflection later. Lawrence said that from a service-user’s perspective, it allows the person to remember what they’ve discussed and share with loved ones. From a clinical perspective, Nilesh said the record allows the clinician to ‘refer back to the rationale’ and ‘enables subsequent conversations to progress’ rather than requiring duplicate conversations. The standard, the speakers hope, will support a culture change towards increased shared decision making across the sector.

In the final session, Cerner’s Andrea Dantas, Riviam’s Paul Targett and Nourish Care’s Jeremy Baldwin discussed their experience of becoming Partners and Quality Partners this year. ‘We have been joining a lot of your (PRSB) workshops, always admiring the fact that you have patients engaged in the standard development, which is absolutely brilliant. So formalising the relationship and becoming a true partner was an obvious choice for us’, explained Andrea. PRSB’s Standards Partnership Scheme recognises system suppliers who are dedicated to interoperability and conformance with standards and the group agreed that joining was a worthwhile commitment for their companies. Having achieved Quality Partner status, Nourish Care’s Jeremy Baldwin pointed out that though the process was rigorous, this was necessary for a Quality Partner accreditation to be meaningful.

The slides from the AGM are available for anyone who missed the event. Please contact info@theprsb.org for more information.

PRSB’s Annual Report is available for anyone who is interested in reading more about our achievements and future objectives. You can find it here

A short film we made to showcase our work on the Personalised Care and Support Plan and its implementation in community mental health services is available here

You can also find clips from PRSB’s AGM on our Youtube channel