Working with Health Innovation Northwest February 2026

There was no meeting of the Patient and Public Involvement Senate in January and the December one was bringing together a summary of the year’s work.

In February, the first presentation was about the structured medication reviews that are currently taking place across Cheshire and Merseyside. Prior to the commencement of the project the group had reviewed the Patient Information resources and suggested quite a few changes which had all been adopted and have now been nationally agreed and rolled out. Training is still ongoing in the area for GPs, pharmacists and nurse clinicians on carrying out the reviews and some reviews are already underway.

The group then reviewed the patient questionnaire for the ENROL project which is a project on rehabilitation of stroke patients online and the survey has been created to determine patients’ views on whether they find the online course via an App preferable to attending sessions at a hospital and how comfortable they feel using the App.

At the November meeting we were given details of the new Community Acute Respiratory Infection (CARI) project. This was started initially in 2021 and involved patients being tested for flu or COVID in the community and treated accordingly. The aim of the project is to reduce hospital admissions for people with acute respiratory infections.

The season 2025/2026 will include point of care testing for more viral infections (flu, COVID, RSV and bacterial infections). It means that antibiotics and antivirals can be used more appropriately. There was an update this month explaining that there are some sites up and running in our area for the project and that it is also being adopted in other parts of the country..

Julia Bate

February 2026