Most meetings are held on the last Saturday of each month in the Outpatients Dept, Ground floor, The Walton Centre, Lower Lane, Aintree, Liverpool and start at 11.00 am. We are a thriving group, can offer lots of support, advice and above all, friendship and humour. For 12 years the group have met every month and provided support, advice and humour to all the local patients, families and friends who attend. We don’t charge anything to come into the meeting, but hold a well stocked raffle each month. One of our members, who is a patient, makes sure we are all well fed with a sumptuous buffet at her own cost – she gives this willingly as her contribution. Our members give tirelessly of themselves to help their fellow patients and carers. We have a system of ‘phone a friend’ to make sure that all members receive a regular call just to say “Hi, are you OK?” A monthly newsletter is produced, and any one who needs cheering up, has been unwell or is celebrating will be mentioned. All meetings are held on the last Saturday of every month, except December when we meet up for Christmas meal out. Our group motto is “You’ll Never be Alone” as we realised at our launch 12 years ago that many patients and carers were just that –alone with their condition and no-one to talk to.
I have just updated (29th November) the web site http://liverpoolsupportgroup.giving.officelive.com/ and this includes pictures from charity night and the students visit to our meeting and ao comments made by the students after he meeting. A couple are listed below I found the support group very helpful in giving on insight into the story of the patient from when symptoms first began, to how they live with their diagnosis. It was also good to hear what the patients had to say about what attributes they thought made a good doctor. It also gave me an insight" into diseases that as yet I have not come across and so this has given me cues to further reading I thought that the support group was very helpful for the patients that attended, and the literature was also very good I think that medical students should be able to have better access to support groups like this as I think that demand would be high and seeing support groups for different diseases would also be beneficial | 