Also attending the meeting was Bill Strettle, the Patient and Public Involvement in Research Co-Ordinator, he who wrote the article "Would you like to become a researcher in the NHS" in the September issue of On-Line. He would like to put another article forward for our members to digest and comment on.

This was followed by a good natter and coffee and biscuits and the meeting closed after 2 hours at 3PM.

Although seventy invites were sent out, only twelve members attended. I did receive twenty letters of ‘apology for absence’. However, we had a very sociable meeting, lots of talking and a few points brought up as well as having a speaker on Aromatherapy. Sylvia Gray brought to our attention the snags she has encountered recently on refrigerating feed bags. She has travelled a lot and always been able to organise the care of the feed bags, but it appears there have been new regulations about housing food stuffs, and cross contamination. We wondered if LITRE could look into this subject and see if it could become widely known that our feed bags are so well packaged, or even to look into whether it would be possible to re-package to suit the new regulations: Also, where there are courses on food hygiene by government bodies, could patients such as ourselves be mentioned.

Patients are still worried about a lack of information in changes in our treatment and feel they only learn of some changes by speaking to other patients or being admitted to hospital. Do other patients have this problem, how is it dealt with and any ideas on keeping up to date?

To try and keep cash expenditure down to a minimum, we all took our own refreshments to the meeting which went along OK but I will try and organise a coffee machine next time even if we all pay our own ‘corner’.

Our speaker was Staff Nurse Marilyn Roberts who has been connected to the Nutrition Unit at Hope for thirty years. She took it upon herself, through her interest in Aromatherapy, to suggest that it would be beneficial to patients on the Unit, who are invariably long term in-patients and who suffer the stress and depression this sometimes brings, to offer them aromatherapy and body massage. It was taken on board by the powers that be but it has taken four years to put into operation so the benefits cannot be judged just yet. We all agreed after listening to what Marilyn had to say, that it cannot help but be beneficial. Full information on the ‘treatments’ available and the strict guidelines adhered to, are on the Unit at Hope hospital, for potential patients. We all agreed at the end of the talk that we would be very interested in having the treatment were we offered it and we thank Marilyn for her time and interest taken.

The meeting closed after three hours, which sped by, but it was nice to meet up with one another again.

Rosemary Martin.