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Clinical terminology and coding
Acceptance criteria
Supporting
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information
PRSB Implementation Guidance
The ‘About Me’ information section supports the sharing of information that the individual thinks is important to share with people caring for and supporting them. This could include information about their needs, preferences, concerns and wishes.
The About me section should be prominently displayed in a shared care record as it is important information about the person relevant to all care and support providers. This information may be available in multimedia formats e.g. jpeg, mp3 etc. These documents are likely to follow a variety of formats but should be transferred in their entirety.
Care will need to be taken in local implementations to differentiate between information in the About me section and things like Advance Directives and preferences and wishes expressed in other care plans such as end of life plans. Likewise reference to any other legal documentation e.g. lasting power of attorney in the About Me should be checked against the electronic record.
Professionals using the information in the About Me section should be reminded that the information is entered by the individual from their perspective and therefore any clinical information contained in the About Me e.g. their allergies or their conditions could be compared with other information in the electronic record.
If there are discrepancies between the About Me information and the information in the electronic record, following discussion between the clinician and individual to reconcile the differences, both the individual and the clinician should (where appropriate) amend their records to align them.
As the About Me section allows for free text and multimedia information it is recommended the individual (or the person supporting them to write the information) is prompted to consider:
that the most important information comes first in any sub-category
avoiding adding too much information as important information may be buried within text making it difficult for the professionals to easily digest the information and use it to personalise care
when multimedia is effective and ensure that videos are kept short
that they do not need to put information about themselves in every element (sub-category of the About Me section) only where they feel they have information they want to share
The elements (sub-categories) enable the individual to record whatever is most important to them and therefore are broad and few in number. Local implementers could decide to structure the information within the sub-categories further but it is not mandatory.
https://theprsb.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/About-Me-Implementation-Guidance-Version1.0.pdf