Our Standards Partnership Scheme officially launched this month, after a successful pilot, with a new partner section on our website featuring a wealth of information about the scheme, its benefits, who’s who in our growing network of partners, our unrivalled partner events and how to achieve excellence in standards conformance by becoming a Quality Partner. We’ve just published our first partner blog by Cerner’s Andrea Dantas and Tim James about standards and the journey to interoperability and we are inviting our partners and contributors to suggest topics and issues that will excite health and care system suppliers and our readers.

We held the latest in our series of partner events last week and were delighted to welcome dozens of partners and a selection of Advisory Board members to discuss our standards roadmap. We shared our pipeline of standards projects for the next six months plus our maintenance release schedule for updating existing standards as well as our priorities for future standards work.

Our partners heard from Peter Skinner, Assistant Director of Programmes at NHSX about plans for improving digital social care records as part of developing Integrated Care Systems including the pipeline of social care standards and their work to develop an approved list of social care system suppliers for procurement purposes.

Improving information sharing at the time people’s care is transferred from one care setting to another is vital for safety and continuity of care and Mike Moore, programme manager at NHS Digital, gave an excellent presentation describing progress with digital information sharing with GP practices, community and primary care, secondary care and plans to mandate transfer of care standards in systems.

Earlier partner events focussed on shared care records and featured presentations by John Farenden, programme director at NHSX for the Shared Care Records Programme and Monica Jones, Executive Lead for Yorkshire and Humber Population Health Management as well as care planning with Dr Nilesh Bharakhada, PRSB Executive Clinical Director.

To find out more contact partners@theprsb.org