New public contributors join our Board and Research & Innovation Steering Group

Bristol Health Partners has strengthened its representation of ‘experts by experience’ at leadership level to ensure that more voices of people with lived experience can be reflected in our work.

Sunita Procter and Michael Pierson join our Board as new public contributors, alongside Stephen Hill.

David Chandler joins Primrose Granville and Soumeya Bouacida as a public contributor on our Research and Innovation Steering Group (RISG), which provides research evidence on health and care to the Integrated Care System for Bristol, North Somerset and South Gloucestershire.

New Board member Sunita Procter is a public contributor to the Healthy Weight HIT and is bringing her knowledge and experience of working with ethnically diverse groups in Bristol to the HIT. She sits on the Bristol Medical School’s Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Committee.

Sunita works as a Trial Portfolio Lead on several medical research trials, including a kidney dialysis trial which successfully recruited more than 1,500 patients to improve the care received by dialysis patients in the future. The trial has an active patient advisory group who provide valuable input on the research being undertaken as well as their own lived experiences.

She says:

“I would like to contribute to making a difference to the quality of life of people and society, as well as the efficiency of health care services across Bristol, North Somerset, and South Gloucestershire.”

Joining Sunita on the Board is Michael Pierson, who is involved in the Chronic Pain Health Integration Team (HIT). He has been a patient volunteer at the Bristol Back Pain Clinic and co-presented Pain Programmes alongside health care professionals from the team.

He was also involved with an NIHR ARC West study on the effectiveness of patient follow on groups after the completion of pain management courses.

He says:

“As someone who has lived with chronic pain for over 20 years and struggled for many years to come to terms with the fact that it wasn’t going away, I have become extremely passionate on the subject.”

David Chandler, who joins our RISG, is part of the Bladder and Bowel Confidence HIT network and provides input about continence issues into an NIHR research project.

As carer to both his parents, David saw first-hand the importance of joined up care between community, secondary and primary care services.

He says:

“I want to represent the views of the BNSSG population, see how services can be developed to improve patient pathways and outcomes, provide more joined up care, and see a way where social care and healthcare can work better together.”