Thursday, 30 November 2023

To start the meeting, everyone briefly introduced themselves and we welcomed new members – Sandy and Roger. Sarah then gave a summary of who we are and what we have been doing together over the last 18+ months.

Kate briefly went through the meeting objectives which were:  

• discuss the six National Standards for Patient and Public Involvement and what they mean to us.
• discuss the challenges people face in interacting with health services.
• discuss new or upcoming projects.

The aim of the first activity was to discuss and rank the six national standards for patient and public involvement. Kate explained that the evaluation of the group that look place in May was based around these six standards, and that it is important that we are transparent with the group about the standards we are working to achieve. We got into small groups and each group had a pack of statements related to the standards. The groups discussed the statements and which ones they thought were more important than others. This turned out to be a challenging task but created great discussion! The consensus was that all of the standards are linked and that they are all as important as each other.

In the second part of the meeting, Heather Parson’s (PPI professional) talked to the group about a project she is involved with called Liver Health – Peer Support Research Study. Heather asked to the group about their experiences of accessing health services and what ideas they had for how this could be improved. Finally, Callum, an ENT surgery trainee who works at SGH and is involved with research in our group, introduced himself to the group and talked to the group about some of the research areas he is interested in.