St James Medical Centre
Patient Participation Group (PPG)
Get involved to help shape the way health services are delivered by your practice
The group works to improve communication between the Medical Centre and patients, to ensure the services on offer truly meet the needs of all patients.
We meet monthly at the St. James surgery, Taunton on the 3rd Tuesday of the month at 6.30 p.m.
Here are the minutes from recent meetings:
We're currently under represented in certain areas. If you're interested and would like to find out more, please check out the New Members Needed tab above.
To help show you what the group is all about the document below contains the possible scope of tasks and below that is a recent press release:
Recent Extract Passed To Various Publications
Our PPG was formed in late 2009. St James Medical Centre has its main surgery in St James Street, Taunton and a branch surgery in Norton Fitzwarren. Originally planned to cover 7,000 patients, it now has approx. 12,000 patients.
We meet monthly for approx. 1.5 hours + time is spent between meetings on various projects, depending on what's needed.
An early task was to agree our Terms of Reference, and these are on the St. James website, within the Patients Participation Group link, as are our meeting Minutes.
Jeff Chiswell is our Chairman and Guy Patey, Practice Manager, and Dr. Rosie Bennyworth are our main practice links, with other GPs taking an interest in our activities.
During the short time we've been together, we've been involved with/had input into:-
- Encouraging use of online repeat prescription and appointment systems.
- Assisting at the 2010 flu clinics.
- Upgrading the St James practice website.
- Introducing separate PPG noticeboards in each waiting room, which are changed regularly.
- Ascertaining the views of some patients who have experienced the pilot stages of ISS (Integrated Support Service), which aims to provide co-ordinated services to keep patients out of hospital, or when they leave hospital. Services were co-ordinated individually for each patient and included care packages, physiotherapy, occupational therapy, etc.
Jeff, our Chairman, has close links with most of the other Taunton area PPG chair persons and we see these as useful ongoing contacts for future activities.
Two of our number attended the NAPP annual conference on Saturday 11 June, which they found informative and thought provoking. Several major NHS topics were discussed.
We're all very conscious of the current NHS proposals and it's not always easy to keep up, or for lay folk to understand, but we try!
In the future, we are considering organising our first "event" this autumn, will be having input into the DES (Directed Enhanced Service) initiative and into the planning of new surgeries from the patients' perspective, as and when they come on stream. Doubtless there will be many other involvements too…
Recently a new member joined us - he's an IT wizard and is heavily involved with upgrading of the website.
We'd like more patient members so that we cover most age groups and ethnicities. We have a constant request on the website and regular noticeboard requests. More members, able to attend our regular meetings + spare some time to assist with our activities, would mean our input becomes even more valuable to the practice.
To sum up, we're still fairly new but, with the encouragement of the practice, we're getting involved and hopefully, it's working to the benefit of the patients.