Please tell us a bit about yourself, your professional background and what made you want to join PRSB?

I join the PRSB from the Royal College of GPs, where I had almost 7 years leading on their accreditation, consultancy service, programmes, and marketing. This was my first role in healthcare, and I soon became passionate about improving standards of care for people. In the final 18 months of my role I was also the Programme Director for the Personalised Care Institute, and as a result I am a total convert to the revolution in care which is personalised care. I was always aware of the great work PRSB was doing and the priorities of the organisation absolutely match my own passions – improving patient care.

Head of Partnerships is a new role at PRSB. What does your job involve?

I feel very privileged to be given the opportunity to take on this new role, to expand the fantastic work the PRSB has already done in launching its Standards Partnership Scheme and the Quality Partner mark. The scheme is designed to ensure the standards developed by the PRSB can be implemented into software suppliers’ existing digital products. This means that when the products are installed into provider – GPs, care homes etc – systems, the standards are already implemented. We work closely with software suppliers and providers of care to support them to meet the requirements of the standards, and to implement them successfully across their systems.

What recent updates should our readers know about the Standards Partnership Scheme?

The Standards Partnership Scheme and Quality Partner uptake has, to use the phrase, ‘gone off like a rocket’, we are extremely busy working mostly with suppliers to support them through the process of conformance. We are delighted to welcome Person Centred Software and Everylife as Quality Partners.

We are also hosting a webinar with social care software suppliers, CASPA, on the 3^rd November for their members, which will give us the opportunity to deepen our engagement with social care, a sector that desperately needs data standards for safe information transfer.

Looking ahead, what are the priorities for the scheme? What key issues need to be addressed?

We need to continue to work closely with system suppliers and the feedback from them has already been fantastic. They are very keen to be affiliated with the PRSB and find use of the Quality Partner mark an advantage to them, their clients see it as a mark they can trust. We’ll soon start to bring together groups of suppliers who work across the same field of care, a great early example of this is the suppliers who deliver software specifically for emergency care. Our next priority is to build more relationships with providers of care – it is end to end implementation we’re keen to drive so we need everyone on board.

What are you most looking forward to about working with PRSB and on the Standards Partnership  Scheme?

Well, it has to be the people. I have been made incredibly welcome by the PRSB family and that includes our partners, members and people in our networks as well as the expert staff team. We are a small organisation with big aspirations and together we can achieve huge things, and I am very excited to be a part of it.

To find out more about how to join the Standards Partnership Scheme please contact partners@theprsb.org.

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