Professional Record Standards Body (PRSB)
Published on: 27th January 2017 | Updated on: 23rd July 2026
The Professional Record Standards Body (PRSB) develops information standards that help health and care professionals record, share and use information consistently. These standards support safer care, better communication between healthcare services, and more joined-up patient records.
Community Pharmacy England works with PRSB, the Royal Pharmaceutical Society (RPS), NHS organisations and other stakeholders to ensure that pharmacy needs are reflected in the development of standards.
PRSB works with patients, pharmacy teams, healthcare professionals and NHS organisations to develop standards for health and care records.
Standards help different people, devices and digital systems exchange information consistently and securely. This enables information to be recorded once and used across different parts of the health and care system.
Good standards can help to:
- Improve patient safety and continuity of care;
- Support better communication between healthcare services;
- Reduce the need for pharmacy teams and other healthcare professionals to manually re-enter information;
- Reduce the need for patients to repeat the same information to different healthcare providers; and
- Support the development of integrated care records, digital services and data-driven improvements across the NHS.
Interoperability is the ability of different systems to exchange, interpret and use information through agreed standards. Improving interoperability remains a key priority for the NHS and is particularly important as health and care services become more digitally connected.
Read more on the PRSB website and its standards pages.
PRSB worked with pharmacy, NHS and system stakeholders to develop standards that support the exchange of information between community pharmacy and other healthcare settings.
These standards support the sharing of information from pharmacy IT systems to GP practice systems and other care settings, helping to improve communication and reduce duplication.
Examples include:
As NHS digital services continue to develop, these standards will over time help support more consistent information sharing across the wider health and care system including within the Single Patient Record, NHS App and other systems.
PRSB has developed computable dose syntax standards.
These standards allow dosage instructions to be structured in a way that can be interpreted consistently by different digital systems. This can support safer prescribing, dispensing and medicines management processes.
The Community Pharmacy IT Group (CP ITG) has previously highlighted the importance of wider adoption of dose syntax standards to improve interoperability and patient safety across healthcare settings.
Read more about computable dose standards and which systems currently support them.
PRSB has developed standards that help define the information included within Shared Care Records.
These standards support the consistent sharing of relevant patient information between healthcare providers, helping professionals access appropriate information when delivering care.
Shared Care Records form part of the wider NHS ambition to improve information sharing and support more integrated care across different services.
Read more about Shared Care Records.
Further information
Further resources:
- PRSB website;
- Standards and interoperability; and
- Shared Care Records.
Community Pharmacy England works with PRSB, the Royal Pharmaceutical Society (RPS) and NHS organisations on pharmacy information standards and interoperability matters.
Getting involved
We welcome feedback from pharmacy owners, pharmacy professionals and pharmacy teams on future standards development.
If you would like to contribute to consultations, user research, stakeholder discussions or future standards-related activities, please contact Daniel.Ah-Thion@cpe.org.uk with “Standards” in the email subject line.
PRSB and NHS organisations may also hold future events and engagement opportunities relating to pharmacy information standards and information flow specifications.
For more information on this topic please email it@cpe.org.uk
