UPDATE 2024: We successfully relaunched our PPG with our first meeting on Thursday 8th February at the Jersey Farm Surgery. Our next planned meeting is 16th May 2024.
We welcome any and all patients to join our group and meet to constructively discuss improvements to the health service we provide. We believe having the opinions and feedback of a diverse range of patients with various health care experiences will help us provide our whole community with our best possible care.
If you would like to be a part of your surgery, please sign up to the PPG and come along to our meetings. If you have not received a message about this please ask one of our reception team to take your details to be added to our PPG list.
We aim to gather patients from as broad a spectrum as possible to get a truly representative sample. We need young people, workers, retirees, people with long term conditions, carers and people from non-British ethnic groups. If you would like to attend our PPG meetings or have any suggestions to improve our Practice, please give the details to any staff member.
What is a PPG?
The Patient Participation Group (PPG) is a collection of patients registered at GP surgery practice who have an interest in its provided services. The aim of a PPG is to represent patients’ views and cross barriers, embrace diversity and work in partnership with the practice to improve common understanding.
A PPG aims to act as the ‘voice of patients’, reflecting local views and opinions and thus having a say in changes and decisions taken within a practice. A practice can also use a PPG as a ‘sounding board’ for new ideas. A PPG will work together with the Practice Manager, to form a link between the patients and the Practice and help to identify new services to meet patients’ needs.
Care Quality Commission and PPG’s
GP Practices and other primary medical services are regulated by the Care Quality Commission (CQC).
This means that they have to be registered with CQC by law. They check services to make sure they meet the national standards of quality and safety, and a central part of this involves listening to the views and experiences of people who use the service and using their views to help make judgements about that service.
Patient participation groups are a valuable source of information about patients’ views and experiences and it is essential that CQC are able to work in partnership with them when they inspect GP practices and that CQC are able to hear from them about patient views.