Community Care Record South West Standardisation & Approval Workshops

The HSE Community Care Record (CCR) is a national programme that will deliver a single digital system for community services across Ireland. Since early 2025, the CCR team has been working closely with staff across the health regions, including detailed workshops with the HSE Mid West from January 2026. Most recently, the team completed focused engagement with HSE South West services as they prepare for implementation.

From 20–24 July, comprehensive in person standardisation workshops took place across the South West. These sessions brought together staff from Primary Care, Older Persons, Mental Health, CAMHS and Specialist Palliative Care. The aim was simple: to explore how CCR will support day to day work and ensure local needs are reflected in the national design.

During the workshops, staff viewed system demos to build familiarity with CCR functionality. They then worked together to shape service workflows—identifying variations, dependencies, inputs, outputs and challenges. This work builds on the national CCR workflows and the earlier engagement with the Mid West. Examples of the workflows explored included referrals, waitlists, appointments, MDT scheduling, inpatient care, bereavements, orders and results, and medication management.

Follow up approval workshops took place from 17–19 August. These sessions provided updates on actions taken since July and offered time for Q&A ahead of final workflow approval. During the workshops, staff were asked to reflect on current habits and ways of working that may need to change to support CCR being fully embedded in their day-to-day work. They were also asked to consider ways their teams can be supported to make these often small but meaningful changes. Behaviour change will be a crucial factor in successful adoption of CCR as new systems and processes only deliver benefits when people change how they work.

Overall, the workshops gave staff a valuable opportunity to step back and consider how they will work in the future. Concerns and questions could be discussed openly, and the benefits of CCR were explored in a practical, service specific way.

The detailed workflows developed for each service—along with the insights gathered—will guide training, change and communications activities ahead of implementation. They will also highlight where updated standard operating procedures or reporting arrangements may be required.

These workshops have provided the CCR programme team with a much clearer picture of how best to support HSE South West during implementation. Sincere thanks to all staff who attended and shared their time, experience and insights.

Join the Change Network to stay updated on the programme activities in your region and visit the Community Care Record on the HSE website to learn more.