Roger Batterbury

Roger wanted to give something back to his community, so he applied to join as a volunteer Chair of the SCAS Patient Panel in February 2024, he is a keen patient advocate and is also the Chairperson at Healthwatch Portsmouth a statutory patient voice group.

He has a background in working in learning disability, mental health and substance misuse services run by the NHS in a Portsmouth and Hampshire setting. In all those areas he involved patients and carers in decision making and interview panels. In his working life he trained to be a mental health nurse.

Roger uses local health services, and he has been a career at times, he has a long history of being a charity board trustee and currently is a trustee for two local charities.

In his role as Patient Panel Chair, he has supported all the current meetings being held and has reported back as the ‘critical friend’ to various SCAS meetings including the SCAS Board. He has said he feels very welcome and part of the team but can speak freely.

One of the great achievements he notes is the ongoing work of the Learning Disability Group in working on making SCAS patient facing documentation into an ‘Easy Read’ format with the help of learning disability service users. He has enjoyed the ongoing work with the Mental Health Group, and he is supporting the recruiting further patients to join the group. He is looking forward to supporting the Youth Group.

“For services like SCAS to be patient focused and for services to be gold standard I believe it is important that the patient voice is heard loud and strong within SCAS and this is what I have been doing since I joined.”