ANNUAL GENERAL MEETING – CHAIRMAN’S REPORT 2014/15
We commenced our third year as a Patient Participation Group in April 2014 with 15
members at that time representing the Market Harborough & Bosworth Partnership;
12 members representing Market Harborough and 3 representing Husbands
Bosworth and Welford surgeries. These combined practices have a practice
population of approximately 28,000 patients. With this amount of membership of
patients for a P.P.G it probably makes us one of the largest groups in the district.
However during the year we did lose, for various reasons including some of the group
members returning to full time work, 3 members and are now down to 12 in total
and are therefore looking to recruit new members.
If any patient attending today’s meeting would have an interest in becoming a
member of the P.P.G. , would they make this known to either myself, our ViceChairman Christine or our Hon. Secretary Natalie during the interval.
Members meet jointly with Medical Centre staff six times a year and alternatively
meet as a patient only group on alternate months. We meet either in Harborough at
the District Hospital Meeting Room opposite the Medical Centre or at Husbands
Bosworth Village Hall, the joint meetings we are joined by a Business/Practice
Manager who attend with a Reception Supervisor, Dr Crowley and an Administrative
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Assistant. I would like to thank all these staff members who attend for their support
and positive involvement in allowing this format to work so smoothly. I would also
like to mention Natalie Pollard our very hard working Secretary for all the work she
does on behalf of the P.P.G. and also mention Christine Willis for the efficient
delivery of our Minute Notes at Patient only meetings. Liaison continues between
meetings via e mails, telephone calls and face to face contact with the Practice
Managers.
Our aims are to foster excellent communications between the practice and patients
how to work with the practice in contributing to continuous improvement of services
in all areas of health care for patients at both practices.
I would now wish to mention some of the events we have been involved in during
the previous 12 months: The group continues to be affiliated to NAPP (The National Association of
Patient Participation) which is the body which overseas and advises patient
participation groups, and provides a monthly newsletter.
 During the first week of June the group supported NAPP’s Awareness Week
with displays in both surgeries and also conducted extra Meet & Greet sessions
during that time. We expect to be involved again in June 2015.
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 We attended the practices ‘flu’ days’ in October, these proved to be good
networking opportunities for the PPG and provided a service for the Medical
Centres.
 During the year we have continued to run our very successful Meet & Greet
Sessions twice a month and I would particularly like to thank Christine Saint
who so effectively organised this and again all of the members who have taken
part for their involvement. These sessions involve face to face interviews with
patients, at both surgeries, looking at ways of finding out what patients feel
would improve the services provided by the partnership, the questions are
changed and updated on a regular basis. Emerging themes are fed back to the
practice and acted upon where practical to do so.
During 2015 we intend to run these sessions again but in a slightly modified
way and welcome the help that has currently been given to Christine by
Annette Rogers in developing the Meet & Greet session , to provide a more
comprehensive feedback from patients.
 Part way through 2014/15 the P.P.G. were offered a menu of survey options
where we elected to ask patients about appointments, Monday evening
surgeries, the Minor Injury Unit and the Partnerships website. As an Action
Plan that followed it was decided to focus on the practices’ website as one of
the priority areas.
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P.P.G. members surveyed 178 patients in the waiting rooms and an Action Plan
from the survey results was formulated. It was decided that the Medical
Centre and Bosworth Surgery should have a single web site and research was
carried out to investigate this. A marketing and web site working party was
formed which included a PPG member, PPG Chairperson, Medical Centre staff
and a GP partner. Work still continues regarding this.
The PPG have their own section within the Market Harborough and Bosworth
websites. There is information available about the PPG, a comments and
suggestion link for patients to feed information back to the PPG, the
Chairman’s Annual Report, as well as all the PPG meeting Minutes which are
available to read to any interested patient. The PPG has pursued the
development of a website to attract virtual members and although we were
not able to launch this through such mediums as Facebook we have now
achieved this through the above mentioned Practice Website where
interaction with patients can be made through the comments and suggestion
contact point to allow those virtual members to participate in the monthly
meeting.
 During the year members raised concern with centre staff from their feedback
with patients in the waiting room concerning the Medical Centre’s Complaints
Procedure. We were given the opportunity to look into the procedural
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document, and with the expert advice and help from PPG member Michael
Edwards, himself a previous Trust Lawyer whilst working for the University of
Hospitals of Leicestershire NHS Trust, we have provided a more suitable and much
improved document to be used by the Medical Centre and patients in the event of
complaints and resolving them. Additionally the PPG will be looking to improve
the current leaflet on Complaints available to patients in the Waiting Room with
Michael’s help.
 We have welcomed a number of keynote speakers to our meetings including the
Laura Croft, Organiser of Hospital Transport, who gave a very interesting talk
which was followed up by PPG member Mike Cheeseman attending an event on
behalf of the PPG which included a presentation by Arriva who currently provide
that service.
 Recently Kevin Blanks Co-Chair of the Alliance Patient and Public Partnership
Group gave a presentation about the groups work and along with many other
local PPG groups we decided that we would affiliate to this organisation, and I will
now represent the PPG on the Alliance Body. The groups key aim is to provide
high quality, efficient care to patients closer to home.
 Both myself and a Practice Manager from the Medical Centre attend locality
meetings with the PPG Chairs Network Group three or four times a year and the
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benefits of these meetings, apart from learning about the Clinical Commissioning
Groups developments is the networking with other PPG group members.
 In November we held under the “Movember” movement a Centre Display for
Prostate Cancer Awareness with the help of Rob Banner from Prostaid the display
proved interesting and successful via promoting Men’s Health issues.
 We have notice boards in the Waiting Rooms at both surgeries, Minutes of the
latest PPG meetings are displayed together with a PPG member’s photograph and
names.
During the last year we have discussed additionally a large number of other concerns
and developments with the Medical Centre Staff such as:
 St Lukes Hospital Developments
 Federating with other practices
 CQC future visits
 New Urgent Care Unit M.I.U.
 Changes to GP Contracts 2014/15
 End of Life Care Plans and After Death Audit
 Performance monitoring
 Patient Online
 Avoiding unplanned admissions
 Planning Application at Husbands Bosworth
 Friends and Family Test
 Patient Choice Schemes and out of area registration
 Car Parking
 Inconsistent Customer Service
In the future we are looking forward to improvements at Husbands Bosworth re a
new build surgery, this will be explained in more detail by Julie Simpson in the next
item.
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Another member of the Medical Centre Staff who gave the PPG much support was
David Bell, Business Manager who moved on to a new post in May 2014 and I am
pleased to say that David’s successor Dan Markovic is with us today and I no doubt
look forward to working with him in the future. Welcome Dan.
Finally, I would like to thank all the members of the current PPG for their support and
involvement over the last 12 months.
This concludes my report, if anyone has any questions I would be only too pleased to
answer them.
Alec Browne - Chairman - March 2015
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