Minutes of the Meeting of the OPPG held by Zoom at 2.30 p.m. on Thursday, 8 April, 2021 

Present:  Lita Gray(LG), Gill Grant(GG), Heather Murdoch,(HM) Jean Clark(JC)

A full debate on the newsletter situation (i.e. When to publish the next one) resulted in the group’s decision to wait until The PPG new format is fully established.

We agreed this will take more time to full develop. We aim to publish our Mission Statement and full working formulas for the future in the forthcoming newsletter. This will include informing the Patients as well as welcome new members.

We arranged to have a further meeting on April 28th to coordinate the results of all our discussions and research to develop a working document for the new look PPG.

We discussed a Healthwatch article that had come to our attention about the National situation of GP’s. We agreed that we will all continue our registrations with Healthwatch and to continue to share all information we can regarding the GP service, in particular our role within that. We discussed the creation of an information liaison role among others so that there is more structure in how we operate.

It was agreed that GG would write to Professor Harris to find out the name of Lakeside’s newly appointed Communication Officer, so that we can liaise and work together. Our aim is to improve communication between Lakeside Oundle and Patients and aid patients communication to Lakeside.

An email by LG was sent to the Practice Manager on the 31st March. This included several concerns from patients.  We await a reply. We agreed we need to set up a working protocol for responses from the Practice to patients concerns and work with in an agreed timeline.

It was noted that patients can no longer make online bookings and continue to have problems with telephone bookings for appointments. This is an on going concern for the group and we aim to pursue this further with the Practice.

We noted that Yaxley Lakeside inform patients of the times and date that their doctors are in surgery. Having been refused this service by Oundle we hope to refer this for further discussion.

We agreed that we would like to ask Professor Harris for a question and answer session with him so that we can clarify several key issues pertaining to Patients concerns.

JC is going to work on setting up our Facebook page and we are working on other modes to improve communication with Oundle Lakeside, which will benefit both the interests of the Patients and Practitioners.

Next meeting by zoom on 28 April 2021 at 2.30 p.m.