‘Colon-aid’ the Yeovil District Bowel Cancer Support Group

Minutes of the 19th Colorectal Cancer Patient Support Group held on Friday 15 February 2008 at St Margaret’s in Yeovil

Present

12 members attended.
Apologies
10 members offered their apologies.
Welcome

There were no new members at this meeting.
Matters Arising

The Loss and Bereavement Workshop has been arranged for Friday 13th June 2008 this was the first date that facilities at St Margaret’s and Liz Martindale’s availability matched. A list of attendees and arrangements for lunch time refreshments will be covered at our May Meeting. Note this is an additional date for June it does not replace our 27th June meeting.

April 2008 Bowel Cancer Awareness Month: Maggie Soulsby had agreed at the last meeting to arrange dates in the third or fourth week for a weekday at YDH and Saturday at an off site venue. Colin said he could arrange for the Western Gazette to run a half page Bowel Cancer Awareness feature with sponsored advertising to run a week before the event. Colin needs to know the dates for the Awareness Days as soon as possible. We were initially looking at April 15, 16, 17, 22, 23 or 24 for the YDH day and Saturday 19 or 26 for the off site day.

Patient View sent us an e-mail on behalf of “The UK Clinical Research Collaboration” (UKCRC) advising us of a new resource for patients and the public asking them to get actively involved by helping to decide what gets researched, how research is done and what happens to results.

Rowland reported that the Web Site had been updated to add the minutes of the last meeting.

Guest Speaker

A guest speaker had not been arranged for this meeting in order to have an extended Open Forum session to allow more time for members to exchange experiences.

Open Forum

The Open Forum part of our meeting covered a range of topics including the differences between patient and carer perspectives of the patient journey. Patients had tendency to minimise their experiences and consider other patient’s journeys as being more difficult than theirs. Whereas carers had a more realistic view of the journey and say “Hang on! It wasn’t quite like that.”

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