Members
Members are volunteers who attend meetings and share ideas and viewpoints which support the Surgery to enable the patient's voices and views to be represented. Membership is open to patients who have an interest in supporting best practice. Members work collaboratively with the Surgery staff, GP's and the members of the community who are registered with the Surgery.
Objectives
The group is established to promote health and to help support and improve the planning, provision and delivery of local NHS services. IT aims to support the highest quality of care for all patients by representing the views of the patient. This is achieved by working in partnership with the Surgery and their staff.
The group is a positive and supportive forum to represent views of the members of the group and also represent the wider patient population.
Aims - What does the PPG hope to do
- The PPG acts as a bridge between the Surgery and patients.
- The group meets on a regular basis to discuss how services can be improved.
- Surveys may be carried out to capture views and patient feedback.
- Communicating with patients via newsletters and on the website to help keep patients informed.
- Inviting guest speakers to present on health and social care issues to help raise awareness.
- Promoting the work of the PPG via campaigns and events.
- Fundraising activities can also be discussed and organised.
What the group does not do
The group is not a forum to voice formal complaints, grievances or to discuss individual treatments. Complaints need to be handled via the Practice Complaints Procedure.
Membership of the group
The group is in its infancy at Fountains Medical Practice and welcomes enthusiastic members who would like to contribute to supporting the needs of patients whilst working collaboratively and positively with the Surgery.
Should you be interested in signing up to the PPG, please liaise with Reception.
Chester Central Primary Care Network Update. December 2019.
PPG and Patient update
We last wrote to you in June 2019 as we embarked on our journey as a Primary Care Network (PCN). So what have we been up to?
Our Network…..This is about our GP practices working together, sharing ideas and developing new ways of working. Our services continue to be in demand and as patients, we know you are expecting more, so our focus has been looking at to what we do and how could we develop new services to help or adjust what we do now.
Next, we feel we would like to have better conversations with our patients. We know our PPGs are pretty variable across our 5 practices, so we think we could develop a PCN PPG. As we grow our services a number of these will be shared across the practices. As a group of 5 practices we are committed to work more closely together. So, a Network PPG might be an option here. We are planning to have a meeting across all the practices. We have set a date for 4th March. 5pm till 7pm. It will be at the Fountains building and we will order some tea and buns to keep you hydrated and energised!
We have been fortunate to secure some new money for some new services. We will be engaging a new social prescribing link worker early in the new year and are aiming to commence a low-level mental health service by Christmas. We also have money to employ a new clinical pharmacist.
We also know our nursing teams and admin teams are under pressure too. We would like to think about how we could be more efficient. We will be starting to look in to these areas in January 2020.
We know we have capacity problems at practice level, so we have been taking a greater look in to our information systems to see what they are telling us. We can then understand more as to what and how new services should be developed. We would like to develop more on-line services and for our patients to have more direct access to other members of the multi disciplinarily team. We would like to get your views here hence sharing this newsletter with PPG chairs and groups. We can discuss more we hope on the 4th march.
What else have we been doing? We had a staff event to see what our receptionists, doctors and nurses thought we could be better at. We have then created our vision and mission statements. See below.
‘Our vision is to develop a partnership between patients and their clinicians that together ensures high quality health service delivery, which are good value for money and meet the needs of the population of Chester Central Primary Care Network.
Our mission as a network is to ensure our communities receive the best evidence-based care possible within our available resources. We will strive to ensure that patients’ views are heard and that their journey through our local health and care system is seamless through integration and partnership working’.
We wanted to develop our joint working practices. So, we have agreed a Collaborative Framework between us. We meet each month to agree this new way of working.
In the meantime, may we take this opportunity to wish you a Merry Christmas and wish you very best wishes for 2020.
Signed by
Drs Aidan Magrath and Rebecca Banks, Joint Clinical Directors on behalf of our Network.
Our key objectives.
- We will provide compassionate care enabling health and care to be more accessible and seamless.
- We will empower our staff and patients to develop and receive health and wellbeing services.
- We will work together and in partnership for our community.
‘Chester Care, Chester Compassion and Chester Community Wellbeing’