How Resident Panel meetings work

We host meetings online as our panel members live all over England.  

When we schedule a meeting, you will receive a panel newsletter with a registration link. This is your invite to register for the meeting via Zoom.  

As part of the registration, you need to provide your email address and full name. 

Zoom will send you a joining link and the option to add a reminder to your email calendar. 

Please note, if you do not receive an email from Zoom, please check your junk mail. If you have not received an email with a joining link, you’ll need to register again (please check you entered your email address correctly). We cannot send these emails to you as Zoom sends them. 

If we have an agenda for the meeting, we’ll send the agenda and meeting reminder email a week before the meeting starts. This is to ensure you have everything you need. 

When you join the meeting, Zoom will ask you to write your name as you want it to appear on screen.  

You can test whether your camera and microphone work. Before each meeting starts, we will add you to the waiting room.

When you enter the meeting, you can turn on your camera and microphone. We mute everyone when the speaker talks to reduce background noise. 

When you enter the meeting, the speaker becomes the screen’s focus, and you can also see other members if you watch in gallery view. Sometimes we may show you presentation slides.  

If you have a question, you can raise your virtual hand or use the Question & Answer (Q&A) function and write your message in the chat screen. Please ensure that any comments you write in the chat are relevant to the topic discussion. 

We turn on captions for the main speaker. If this option does not appear for you, then you’ll need to click on the 3 dots 'more' and select 'turn on captions'. 

For some meetings, we may put you into breakout rooms for smaller group discussions. These sessions give you an opportunity to share ideas and feedback with each other. Our team facilitates the sessions and provides feedback to the meeting organisers.  

After the session we send you a survey asking for your feedback on how you found the meeting. We will also share any slides from the session. We will then share feedback with the relevant teams across the organisation to feed into our work. 

We currently use Zoom to host online meetings. This is because Zoom is free for everyone, works easily, and accessible from most devices. 

Zoom also lets us turn on a chat transcript which provides subtitles when speakers talk. We can also allocate members to breakout rooms for smaller group discussions. 

If you’re having technical difficulties, please do not use the chat function to tell us as this will notify everyone in the meeting. If you’re having issues, we suggest you leave the meeting, close the app or browser, and then try to rejoin.  

You can find further information about how to use Zoom on various devices in this support article. 

Join a Zoom meeting without downloading the app

You can join a meeting from a web browser without downloading any plugins or software. 

You’ll receive invitation links via email. The link will redirect you to register for a zoom joining link. 

1. Find the meeting invite link from your email or calendar invitation.
2. Click the join link to join the meeting.
3. On your web browser, a pop-up window will prompt you to open or download the application.
4. In the pop-up window, click Cancel.
5. At the bottom of the page, click join from your browser.
6. This will direct you to a new page.
7. Click ‘Allow’ to allow Zoom permission for your microphone and camera.
8. Sign in with your name to join the meeting.
9. (Optional) Select the Remember my name for future meetings check box.
10. Click Join.

Find out more about joining a meeting from a web browser via this Zoom Support article.