Taking stock and planning
Before embarking on a change programme to implement the Wound Care Information Standard, organisations need to understand their starting point including the readiness of the workforce, any current/planned systems and technology and the local priorities for change.
This will help inform a route map where changes can be delivered in small, achievable steps, building confidence and momentum, and increasing chances of successful change. Progress can be measured against the priorities and goals agreed by local stakeholders.
This section takes you step-by-step through assessing your readiness to change, taking stock of your current position and planning implementation of the standard.
There are three phases:
- Assess your readiness: The current state from clinical, technical and operational perspectives
- Plan the changes
- Agree how you will measure and evaluate the change programme
Assess your readiness
The following tools will help you at the beginning of your project to evaluate the readiness of your organisation:
Download our checklist here to assess your readiness
Download our Organisational Readiness Matrix here to record each organisations readiness
Planning a stock take
Follow the steps below to start planning your stock take.
Schedule events and meetings to tell people about your standard implementation plans as part of digital transformation and encourage them to join in the project.
Check your understanding of the problem you might be trying to fix and consider how your sense of the situation is different from the view other stakeholders might have based on their different knowledge and experience, for example as point-of-care professionals.
Offer an opportunity to bring representatives from different stakeholder and professional groups together to find out what they might have in common, how they are different in their approaches, culture, and language, and how they can work towards a shared objective.
Remember that the implementation of the PRSB (Professional Record Standards Body) standard is a people-based cultural endeavour and cannot succeed without the hearts, minds and professional expertise of all your stakeholders.
Holding a stock take workshop
The table below illustrates how you might plan stakeholder sessions to take stock of your local system’s readiness to adopt the Wound Care Information Standard. It outlines who the participants might include for the purpose of the stock take discussion and what materials/questions to address during each session.
Optionally you may find it beneficial to link with wound care information standard change programmes in other ICSs to:
- Establish areas of common concern
- Identify how to effectively share information, identifying common barriers to interoperability, reducing reliance on information workarounds, reducing reliance on informal communication, overcoming workforce scepticism
- Test out possible support materials
Such sessions could enable front-line clinicians and transformation teams from your ICS to learn from their peers in other ICSs.
Systems and data flows
To understand how wound care information is currently recorded in each of the stakeholder organisations it is recommended that an information gathering exercise is undertaken.
The grid below captures how the stakeholder group currently captures and shares wound care information:
Process mapping
To help understand each step in the capturing and sharing of wound care information, a process mapping exercise can be undertaken by your organisation.
The ‘to be’ process maps should then be developed for each of the systems that will be implementing the Wound Care Information Standard and should take a whole service (patient pathway) design approach.
Baselining
To baseline a project you will need to consider four elements; milestones, budget, schedule and scope.
- Milestones: These are the key points in a project you expect to reach by a specific date or range within the project’s start and end dates.
- Budget: Your budget is how much you plan to spend on the project.
- Schedule: When planning any project, you and your team members need to know its duration. The schedule baseline is your project’s planned timeline.
- Scope: Scope is the expected project outcome, any deliverables, and the problem they solve.
Beyond these four elements, you may also want to include other project documents like the work breakdown structure (WBS), activity or task list, and more, to add detail to each of these steps.
Your organisation’s Project Management Office (PMO) will have project management templates to support you to baseline and deliver you project. However as the Wound Care Information Standard is best implemented in partnership across multiple organisations (e.g Integrated Care System) it may be that each organisation has its own project plan which feeds into an overarching programme plan.
Assessing current conformance to the standard
The PRSB team work closely with system suppliers and health and care providers to support the implementation of the standard and also provide robust and independent evidence of their implementation with the award of the PRSB Quality Mark of conformance. Systems which have undergone this process can be found on the Quality Partner section of our website.
PRSB standards represent best practice but achieving full conformance is a journey and whilst full conformance is a good goal for any implementor to aim for, you can achieve a safe and compliant instance of the standard with a lower level of compliance, this is why we have three tiers of conformance and you can find more information about our process of conformance here.
Providers of services can ask system suppliers to provide evidence of their level of conformance by producing their Quality Mark conformance statement, and if you are undertaking a new procurement exercise ensure this is part of your selection criteria. As many systems are re-configured locally even if the supplier system is conformant, you will still need to check that your local implementation is also conformant.
For help and support with assessing conformance with standards, please get in touch with partners@theprsb.org or use our contact form.
System suppliers should provide evidence that they conform with the standard. More information can be found in the standards conformance process section.
Procurement
If, as part of the stock take, a system procurement is identified the choice of system procurement route is a local decision and driven in part by the proposed option (for example an extension to an additional service or system vs. a completely new procurement).
There will be national and local procurement protocols that will need to be followed in relation to the PRSB standard implementation.
Understanding governance requirements
It is important to engage the local care system Information Governance team early in the project. They will confirm what activity must be done prior to any data sharing.
Regardless of the system being used for sharing information, Information Governance is a key requirement. If your area has a shared care record in place you may find an over-arching Information Sharing Agreement (ISA) has already been signed by the data sharing partner organisations.
Data Protection Impact Assessment
If the sharing of wound care process and outcome information involves a new set of data about a person or significantly changes the way in which the data is processed, you will need to carry out Data Protection Impact Assessment (DPIA). The DPIA is a structured assessment of the potential impact on confidentiality, privacy, and data protection. The data items to be shared or processed are included. Your Information Governance team will have a DPIA template for you to complete.
Clinical safety and risk management
It is recommended that you make contact with your local care system clinical safety officer or clinical safety management team early in the project. They will be able to advise you on the clinical safety management process that is in place and advise on the development of the clinical safety management process and fulfilling DCB0160 (see below).
Organisations embarking on deployment of health IT systems are required to apply clinical risk management for the deployment, use, maintenance or decommissioning of Health IT Systems within the health and care environment NHS England standard DCB0160 expands on the DCB0129 clinical safety standard applied by the manufacturers of the health IT system.
Health organisations must establish a framework within which the clinical risks associated with the deployment and implementation of a new or modified health IT system are properly managed.
See NHS England’s Clinical risk management guidance
Building a roadmap
Taking all the baseline evidence and material gathered, develop your local roadmap for change. Focus on all aspects of change including staff readiness.
Work with key stakeholders to develop the plan to ensure commitment and buy-in.
Here is an example roadmap that you may want to follow as a guide.
Checklist and questions to consider
The following checklist will help you determine whether you have the right leadership, governance and controls in place for a transformation programme to succeed. The set of questions that follows will help you gauge your readiness to take stock and plan your transformation programme.
CHECKLIST
Clear senior management ownership and leadership
Appropriate skills for the programme/project team
Clear roles and responsibilities
Effective financial control
Success criteria that clearly link objectives to outcomes, and clear links with the organisation’s key strategic priorities
Effective risk management
Sound commercial knowledge of the supplier marketplace, linked to the requirement and management of the supplier over the contract term
Involvement of key stakeholders throughout the programme/project
Breaking development and implementation into manageable steps
Effective project team integration between clients, the supplier team and the supply chain
QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER
What are the ‘fixed’ points – e.g. system upgrades, procurements etc.?
What activities must take place to achieve change? Awareness raising, training, information governance agreements, clinical safety assessments, system changes, testing etc.
What have stakeholders identified as the biggest priorities for them and when could those changes be delivered?
What are the dependencies? What must happen before other changes can be achieved?
Which changes could be achieved relatively quickly and achieve tangible benefits for staff and patients?
What are the opportunities for piloting the new system (or parts of the new system) on a small scale and who needs to be involved?
Should organisations join the process in a phased way? What is the preferred phasing for organisations joining in?
What needs to happen to ensure smooth running of existing systems during the transition?
What needs to happen to ensure smooth running of existing systems during the transition?
Desired outcomes and measuring
The review of the systems and data flows across the organisations, may provide an opportunity to review the current key performance indicators (KPIs). The KPIs should be used to develop a baseline measurement to be used to evidence improvement upon implementing the standard.
However, current KPIs may not be agreed across the whole system patient pathway and may require further work to reach a common set of indicators. (There will already be nationally reported metrics which may be monitored and are noted in the business case as a driver for change).
You can agree the metrics that are relevant to you, but some suggested measures are in the table below:
Aim | Outcome | Measures |
Enabling best evidence-based practice becomes a routine | Fewer wounds, faster healing, better prevention and management, and less suffering
| Number of people with
|
Enabling people to self-manage their wounds better
| Increased self-management | Number of people who self-manage |
Supporting sharing of information between clinicians, their systems, and across settings through standardised information recording, allowing the effective use of clinician’s time | Effective use of clinical time Improved data quality
| Number of Records that are shared Data quality measures |
Supporting public health, research and commissioning of services based on standardised data
| Support for research and commissioning | Number of records |
Go to
Assess your readiness
Plan the changes
Measure and evaluate
PRSB Standards Explained
Why we need standards to record our health and care information in a consistent way so that it can be made available whenever it is needed.
Making change happen
Transformation programmes need clear goals, the right leadership and engaged staff and stakeholders. Get started by reading our information on transformational change.
PRSB Support Available
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