EAST RIDING OF YORKSHIRE

LOCAL INVOLVEMENT NETWORK

(ERYLINk)

November 2009

Hello and Welcome...

Election Up-
date
It’s difficult to believe that since the last newsletter Autumn has passed us
by and we are now very quickly heading towards Christmas. It has been a
busy time for the LINk with the election and induction of a new Lead Group
and the establishment of several small action groups. It now feels that the
ERYLINk is really beginning to undertake the work that it was created for,
the next challenge is to ensure that you, the member feels able to contrib-
ute to the LINk agenda, is kept informed of what is happening and can see
Getting that the LINk is able to make a real difference to health and social care in
Involved the East Riding.

Membership continues to grow and currently stands just short of 400 indi-
vidual and organisational members. It is wonderful to have so many mem-
bers……..until there are 400 envelopes to fill! It is also good to meet mem-
bers both existing and new. The Disability Fayre at Driffield in October was
a good opportunity to meet potential new members, listen to people’s sto-
ries and also catch up with existing members. We also meet members dur-
Website ing the open part of the Lead Group meetings, all members are able to at-
tend but please let us know if you would like to come along so that we can
make sure that you have a seat!

Involving the membership is very important to the LINk so it was really

good to receive so many completed questionnaires responding to the Big
Care Debate. All the responses were forwarded to the Green Paper Team
and will form part of the national feedback.

This newsletter tells you about the different ways that you can become in-
Forums volved in LINk activities, whether it is receiving the newsletter, responding
to questionnaires, contributing to the action groups or attending meetings,
there’s something for everyone!

Best wishes,
Susan Oliver
Delivery and Development Manager

The ERYLINk is hosted 1

by Humber and Wolds
Rural Community Council
 Contents
What’s in store for this edition of the newsletter? Read on and find out!

Page 3 Election Update: Find out who you elected to the new
ERYLINk Lead Group!
Page 4 Action Group Update: Find out about the work that has
been going on in the Action Groups, created to take on the
issues from the Launch Tour
Page 5 Getting Involved: New Action Groups, particular tasks…
Page 6 Web Presence: Check out our website
Page 7 ERYLINk Forums:
Page 8 Forthcoming Events

Please remember, this is your newsletter—would you like to contribute to it?

Please do feel free to send us any bits of health and social care news from
your community, to share upcoming events with other members, or perhaps
to report back on an event that you have been involved in, or to see if other
members are interested in working with you on a particular issue or area of
interest. Do get in touch and send us anything that you would like to see in-
cluded here.

We need your email addresses!

Getting information out to our members via this newsletter is slow
and costly. We want to make sure that information is distributed
as widely as possible, and as quickly as possible so that all mem-
bers are able to make the most of all opportunities to get in-
volved, have your say and find out more about local events and
issues.
If you have an email address and would be happy for us to send
newsletters and other information by email instead of in the post,
we would be really grateful if you could share it with us—email us
at erylink@hwrcc.org.uk, telling us your name, town or village and
that you are happy to receive correspondence by email.
Thankyou!

2
 Election Update

The ERYLINk election process has finally been completed, we received a

total of 95 valid ballot papers, which have been and independently verified
(with huge thanks to Clare Binnington, Driffield Town Clerk). We are there-
fore very pleased to announce that we now have a formally elected Lead
Group made up as follows:
Individual Members:
Eddie Brooks (42 votes)
Raymond Evans (58 votes)
Joan Fletcher (65 votes)
Ronald Hart (41 votes)
Ruth Marsden (Chair) (55 votes)
Angela Novak (48 votes)
Jean Turner (52 votes)
Sylvia Whitton (52 votes)

Organisational Members:
ERVAS (East Riding Voluntary Action Service): Sharon Clay (63 votes)
Mencap Advocacy Service East Yorkshire: Carol Hills (66 votes)
OPCMG (Older People’s Charter Monitoring Group): Pat Perkins (55 votes)
Age Concern East Riding of Yorkshire: Mark Rounding (70 votes)
Headway Hull and East Riding: Lesley Saunders (47 votes)
BCL (Beverley Community Lift): Coun. Jim Whitfield (48 votes)
Goole & District Coalition of Physical Disabilities: Clifford Woolass (39
votes)
PAGER (Pensioners Action Group East Riding): Jean Wormwell, MBE (72
votes)

The new Lead Group will continue the

work already begun and will continue to
push for action to improve health and
social care services within the East Rid-
ing of Yorkshire, as well as continuing
to highlight and share good practise.

The election of Chair and Vice Chair took place in early November and these
posts were voted for by the Lead Group itself. Our Interim Chair, Ruth Mars-
den, has been elected as Chair and the post of Vice Chair remains vacant at
present.

If you would like to find out a little more about the Lead Group members, you
will find their personal statements from the nomination process on our web-
site at www.erylink.org.uk. We also hope to introduce you to them less for-
mally through our future newsletters, web updates and open forums.

3
 Action Group Update
We have a number of Action Groups up and running and busily working on
issues that are important to our communities. We are always keen to see
more members participating in our Action Groups, so if you would like to find
out more about getting involved, please do get in touch with us. In particular,
we are keen to find members interested in getting involved with the Market-
ing and Membership Action Group and the Healthy Living Action
Group. In the meantime, here’s a quick low-down on the different Action
Groups and the work they are currently involved with.
• Enter & View Team—the team who will work to undertake ‘enter and
view’ visits to health and social care facilities.
• Mental Health Interest Group—Looking at issues around mental
health and learning disability, including the Mental Health Partnership,
Community Psychiatric Teams, improving access to psychological
therapies, user experience, learning disability strategy etc.
• Transport Action Group—The first Action Group to get up and run-
ning—this group is very active, looking at all issues around patient and
visitor transport and enjoying productive relationships with relevant
managers in Yorkshire Ambulance Service and various NHS Trusts.
• GP Access Action Group— To undertake the work of responding to
and moving forward the issues raised in the ERYLINk consultation on
GP Access, and to ensure that the voices of the community are heard
in the relevant places relating to GP issues.
• Acute Hospitals Action Group—To monitor, raise and maintain the
standard of health care provided by acute settings used by the resi-
dents of the East Riding
• Care in the Community Action Group—Considering the range of
health services provided in the community currently and what the fu-
ture plans are to develop this.
• Healthy Living Action Group—this is a new group, planning to focus
on issues around health and well-being promotion and illness preven-
tion, and looking at how these can be effectively monitored.
• Marketing and Membership Action Group—engaging ‘hard to reach’
sections of our community and finding ways of making it easier for
them to get involved with the ERYLINk, ensuring equality and diversity,
and making sure the ERYLINk is fully accessible.
The core purpose of all these groups is to work on the issues that
ERYLINk members locally feel are important. If you have experience of
a local issue that you would like to raise and see one of the groups
take a closer look at and improve, please let us know! You don’t have
to join one of the groups to get your issues on the agenda.
4
 Getting Involved
The ERYLINk needs you!
The ERYLINk exists for it’s members—as a democratic
organisation, the ERYLINk seeks to hear the views of all
it’s members, and to work towards responding to those
views. The ERYLINk is your voice on the issues that con-
cern you, so we need you to keep in touch and tell us
what your local issues are in relation to health and social
care.
There are loads of ways you can get involved—you might wish to join one
of the Action Groups to work on an area that you are interested in or have
knowledge and experience in, you might just wish to give us a call, or email
us to share an issue that has arisen in your area, or an experience that you
have had that you think the LINk should know about. Our members are wel-
come to attend meetings of the Lead Group, and you can find information
about Lead Group meetings, including minutes of those meetings on our
website.
Maybe you would like to get involved in other ways—perhaps you would be
willing to be called upon to come and help us when we have a large mail-
out to do—we’re always happy to provide tea and biscuits in return for help
putting a mail-out together. Maybe you are a technical whiz and would like
to help us develop our web presence—we would like to look at creating a
presence for the ERYLINk on Facebook and Twitter and other social net-
working sites—would you be interested in helping with that? Sometimes we
are asked to provide a LINk representative to groups and committees—
perhaps you would like to receive training to become involved in that way?
Or maybe there are other ways you would like to get involved that we have-
n’t thought of yet! Please get in touch and tell us about them!

Please keep in touch and help us to make sure that the

ERYLINk is a truly local organisation, responding to it’s
members.

Yes, it’s another request for help! We are looking for a volunteer
who is web-savvy and would be interested in looking after and
developing the ERYLINk website. This would involve updating
the website with relevant news, events, reports, meeting minutes
etc. If you wanted to explore a wider remit than this, and have
ideas for how the website could be improved, better promoted,
make better use of facilities like polls and surveys, be more inter-
active or more user-friendly, then we would love to hear your
ideas. To discuss this further, please contact the office.
5
 The ERYLINk Website

Have you found time to have a look at the ERYLINk

Website? You will find it at www.erylink.org.uk

We are trying to keep the website updated with news

items, both from within the ERYLINk itself, and with
news and updates from wider areas that might be in-
teresting or useful to you, such as meetings, events held by other local LINks, or
other voluntary sector organisations in the region, conferences and training relat-
ing to health and social care, current consultations being undertaken locally and
nationally etc.

We also post details on the website of our Lead Group meetings, both so that
you can attend the public part of the meetings if you wish, and so that you can
keep up to date with what is happening within the ERYLINk by reading the min-
utes of our meetings online.

Descriptions and minutes of the Action Groups will be appearing on the website
in the next few weeks, in order that you can keep abreast of the work going on
there, or find out more if you are considering getting involved with one of the
groups.

If you would like to find out more about the members of the Lead Group, their de-
tails are online from the personal profiles they completed for the election proc-
ess.

We are hoping to be able to establish a stronger presence on the internet in the

coming months if we are able to recruit a volunteer to help us establish and
maintain a presence on social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter—
hopefully this might help the ERYLINk to engage more fully with wider sections
of the community than we are currently doing.

Please do take a moment to go and have a look at the website if you have inter-
net access—and let us know what you think—we always welcome your ideas!

6
 ERYLINk Forums

Another way in which you can find out what ERYLINk is doing is by coming
along to the ERYLINk Forums. These are opportunities for members to meet
each other and the Lead Group. An opportunity to find out what work is being
undertaken on behalf of the membership and join in discussions about health
and social care.

To make these Forums really work well

we need to know if there are particular
topics you would like us to cover. For ex-
ample, would you like to know more about
how peoples needs are assessed so that
they can continue to live in the commu-
nity? Do you want to know how the local
NHS is structured? Do you want to know
how to make a complaint (or of course a
compliment) about a service you have received? Would you like to know
more about the different voluntary organisations that support people with
their health and social care needs? The list is endless but rather than us de-
cide what the subject should be it would be much better if you tell us!

We are planning for our first Forum event to be held in February 2010.
Please call, write or email (all our contact details are on page 8) to tell us
what you would like us to cover.

Because the East Riding is such a big county, the venue for the forum will
move around, this will give members across the area an opportunity to attend
without having to travel too far.

We look forward to meeting you in 2010!

7
 And Finally...

That’s about all we can squeeze into the newsletter this time. Do keep
us in touch with anything that’s happening in your area—we’d be more
than happy to include news and articles direct from the membership. In
our next issue we hope we’ll be able to include more news and informa-
tion about the Annual General Meeting and Forums, as well as begin-
ning to introduce the new Lead Group Members to you and bringing you
all the relevant updates from the Action Groups and consultations etc.

In the meantime, whilst it might seem a little early, we want to take the
opportunity to thank you all for your support of the ERYLINk and wish
you all the very best for a happy festive season.

Very best wishes,

The ERYLINk Team

Finally, here are some up and coming events that might be of interest to
you…

ERYLINk Lead Group Meeting—30th November, 10:30am, Beverley

Minster Parish Rooms (Emmaus Conference Room)

Personalisation Update Event—1st December, 9.30-12.30, The End-

sleigh Centre, Beverley Road, Hull. Exploring how the personalisation
agenda in health and care services is progressing. For information, con-
tact: 01482 221 372(option 2) or email link@hull-cvs.co.uk

Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender (LGBT) Conference—3rd

December, 9.30-4.30, Quality Royal Hotel, Hull—exploring and raising
awareness of issues for the LGBT Community and sexual health ser-
vices. Details from Marek Mironski, tel: 01482 336166 or email
marek.mironski@chcphull.nhs.uk

Tel: 01377- 232135/6

Freepost Plus
Fax: 01377 - 255646
RSAL - HUCE - SBAJ Email:
35 Eastgate North erylink@hwrcc.org.uk
Driffield Website:
YO25 6DG www.erylink.org.uk