A meeting of the UKPL Reference Group will take place in London on 21st September.  We have some vacancies in this group, so if you would like to get involved, please let us know.

Role of the Reference Group

The role of the Reference Group is to provide advice and support to the UKPL Steering Group and to the site Provider.  This advice may concern clinical matters, in prostate cancer care or research.  It may also concern matters of user needs.

Examples of previous work undertaken by the group include reviewing the topic descriptions used throughout the Information section and identifying the stages of the Patient Journey.

Who can join the Reference Group

The Reference Group is open to anyone who is affected by prostate cancer or whose work concerns them.  This means patients, family members, other carers, nurses, GPs, specialist doctors and information providers.

What is the meeting for?

The meeting is an opportunity for us to talk directly about some of the key issues around prostate cancer information to the people who matter most:  patients and health professionals who use that information.

There are a number of issues we'd like views on, and we will spend a greater part of the meeting discussing them.  This includes:

• how best to fit information to the patient's context (i.e. the usefulness of the "patient journey", "cancer journey", etc)
• how we evaluate the quality of information on prostate cancer websites
• how ensure transparency of the evaluations

It's also an opportunity to meet the team behind UK Prostate Link.

The meeting lunch will be shared with the Steering Group, who meet straight after the Reference Group, so it's also an opportunity to meet with them informally.

We will report on the proceedings of this meeting in our next newsletter.  Please get in touch if you are interested in joining the Reference Group.