IMPORTANT INFORMATION

This website is no longer being updated.

NHS Barnsley Clinical Commissioning Group has been legally dissolved and from 1 July 2022 has been replaced by a new organisation: NHS South Yorkshire Integrated Care Board (SY ICB). NHS South Yorkshire ICB is now responsible for commissioning and funding of health and care services locally. Please go to our new website www.southyorkshire.icb.nhs.uk for information about the work of NHS South Yorkshire ICB and details about how to contact us.

Thank you.

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Patient Stories

Governing Body Meetings

At the start of our monthly governing body meetings we hear and discuss an account of someone’s experiences regarding their health care – referred to as a ‘patient story’. 

Patient stories bring experiences to life and make them accessible to other people. They encourage the NHS to focus on the patient as a whole person rather than just a clinical condition or as an outcome. Patient stories are often used in board meetings of organisations that provide direct care such as hospitals and use real patients telling their experience of using those services with the aim of understanding what the organisation needs to do better.

As a CCG, our focus is on commissioning high quality health care and ensuring that it is delivered to the standard required across a wide number of organisations and services.  Although most of our Governing Body work clinically or have clinical backgrounds we feel it is important to remind ourselves of our core purpose and we therefore use what we call a ‘composite’ approach to construct relevant patient stories in that they are often more than one person’s experience and are anonymised and spoken by an actor. In this way we aim to highlight an ethos and impact without focusing on an individual patient or staff from a named service.

The patient story at our monthly meetings is usually focused on a theme and the governing body members use it as an opportunity to focus in on this theme and understand the impact of someone's experience on them, their family and carers. It helps show things through a patient's eyes and is often a very powerful way to start the meeting to influence the atmosphere in which the meeting takes place. The aim is that the thoughts triggered by the story are considered at the outset, during and at the end of the meeting to promote and strengthen that atmosphere and the discussions that take place about agenda items.

We will be bringing you the stories that were told at each meeting on film.