Minutes of Executive Committee Meeting of 15th April 2016
Committee members present: Apologies:
Phil Tittensor Sue Higgins
Sarah Tittensor Siobhan Hannan
Marie Hooper
Jan Bagshaw
Catherine Doherty
1. Minutes of previous meeting:
Read and agreed.
2. Secretarial situation:
Membership Secretary: Due to personal issues, Sue Higgins has sadly needed to tender her resignation from the ESNA Executive. Sue has been a very long serving member of the exec with one of the most demanding roles in the association. The remaining executive members wish to thank her for the enormous contribution she has made over the years and to wish her well for the future.
As a temporary measure, Sarah Tittensor has agreed to pick up the role of membership secretary. We will also ask Lisa Scott to pick up some of the duties that Sue undertook. Briefly, these are:
· Distribution of information to the membership (Lisa to forward after checking content with Phil);
· Updating membership lists (Lisa and Sarah);
· Chasing subscriptions (Sarah);
· Processing new member details (Sarah);
· Point of contact for members problems (Lisa but plan to be distributed to the appropriate member of the executive);
· Point of contact for journals (Sarah);
· Point of contact for Epilepsy Action (Sarah);
3. Paediatric competencies:
Siobhan has kindly agreed in principle to pull together a team, but given the current lack of committee members it was felt that this initiative needed to be postponed until after 2016 Conference.
4. Website:
Lisa has kindly agreed to manage the website in terms of updating members and adding content. It is apparent that many of the executive members are not sure how to do this and Phil will try to produce a crib sheet.
Action: Phil
5. Locality Groups:
Sarah has now taken over locality group co-ordination while Carrie Burke is on maternity leave. Unfortunately, she has still not received the app from the localities. She is going to write again to each of the locality leads to find out which groups are active and which groups are not. It feels like a fool spent benefit to advertise the presence of locality groups as a benefit of membership, if very few of them actually do anything.
Action: Sarah
6. Finance:
Our current account stands at £2489.34. Our savings account stands at £6839.50. Approximately £2000 of the costs for Conference has already been paid with about £8000 left to pay. We have sponsorship commitments totalling around £10,000 so financial situation is stable.
7. JEC Membership:
The committee was concerned to hear that Epilepsy Action withdrew from the joint epilepsy council last week. As an organisation, ESNA is also concerned that the JEC is currently ineffective. However, the executive also believe in the aims of the overarching body and, therefore, have no plans to withdraw membership at this point.
8. Epilepsy Care
Funding from EISAI has now expired. Brian Chapel, the co-editor, is exploring funding from UCB Pharma. This is an ongoing situation.
The editorial content of the journal continues to be very good and plans are well advanced for the June issue.
Action: Jan and Brian Chapel
9. Other Journals
Epilepsia, ACNR, Progress. The distribution secretaries for the ACNR and Progress have
now been contacted by Sue and provided with up to date membership lists. Sarah will
now continue to keep them updated so that all members are sent the relevant journals.
Action: Sarah
Now that Lisa has agreed to take the role of administrator for Epilepsia, Marie will go back to Wyllie and negotiate a deal. Hopefully, access to Epilepsia can be restarted as a membership benefit in the next or so.
Action: Marie
10. Conference 2016
Sponsorship has been going well. We have confirmed sponsorship from UCB Pharma, EISAE (who are also sponsoring a symposium), BEIL, Special Products and Leva Nova. Sanofi have expressed an interest in sponsorship as well.
We will provide delegate packs for the conference. All of the companies will be invited to put flyers into the packs if they wish. Sarah will organise the packs.
Action: Sarah and Phil
The conference programme is now complete. The programme is as follows:
Sunday 19th June 2016 (afternoon) Speaker
1.00pm – 1.30pm Registration
1.30pm – 2.00pm Epilepsy Nurses Impact Tool : Epilepsy Action Juliette Ashton & Perry
2.00pm – 2.50pm Nursing Research and the Sudep check list Professor Rohit Shanker
2.50pm – 3.40pm Revalidation and Nursing and Midwifery Miles Wallis (Communications
Council updates and Engagement Manager from
The NMC)
3.40pm – 4.10pm Break
4.10pm – 5.00pm Medico-Legal Issues in Epilepsy Nursing Jan Bagshaw
5.00pm – 6.00pm ESNA AGM
7.00pm Drinks Reception
7.30pm Conference Dinner
Monday 20th June 2016 (full day)
7.30am – 9.00am Breakfast
9.00am – 9.30am Registration
9.30am – 10.15am EISAI sponsored Symposium on Concordance
10.15am – 11.00am Cannabidol and Epilepsy Professor Ben Wally
11.00am – 11.30am Break
11.30am – 1.15pm Pregnancy, Contraception and Obstetrics Dr Doug McCory and the
Issues – A panel discussion Birmingham Epilepsy and
Obstetrics Team
1.15pm – 2.00pm Lunch
2.00pm – 3.00pm Genetics in Epilepsy Professor Sanjay Sosodia
3.00pm – 3.15pm Break
3.15pm – 4.00pm Seizures, Epilepsy, The Law & Driving – What Professor Tony Marson
do you know?
4.00pm – 4.15pm Closing Remarks Phil Tittensor
Speakers fees will be £200 + travelling expenses.
Sponsors have agreed to pay £2000 for a stand or £3000 for a stand and Symposia.
Because of Sue’s resignation, all enquiries for the conference now need to be directed to Marie, email: , address: C/O The
Community Neurology Service, New Brook House, 385 Alfreton Road, Nottingham, NG7
5LR. Phil will amend the necessary booking forms.
Action: Phil
We are unsure how many people have confirmed for conference at this point. Phil will
ask Sue for an up to date list.
Action: Phil
We need to step up the advertising for the conference. We will sort out more flyers and
distribute these through Epilepsy Action, the ILAE, our own website, our own
distribution list, Jan Bagshaw’s organisation, other meetings being attended by
executive members and the sponsoring companies.
Action: Phil
11. Any Other Business:
The issue of other health professionals being members of ESNA was raised. The constitution and aim of the organisation is to encourage membership from non-nurses. This can include support workers. Support workers from Quarries in Glasgow are interested and Sarah will contact them. Jan also has a number of support workers and organisations on her distribution list and will advertise the inclusivity of ESNA to those.
Action: Jan and Sarah
Epilepsy Alliance
There will be a rearranged date for the Motivational Training Day. This has not yet been finalised.
The impact tool will be given coverage at the conference.
Sudep Check List
Although ESNA felt unable to endorse the tool, we have now been very happy to offer Rohit Shanker the chance to speak at our conference about it.
The ILAE are organising a task force to examine best practice in urgent care of seizures. So far, there has been no interest from the membership to attend this important meeting. Catherine Doherty will attend from the Executive, and we will organise a further advertisement for the membership inviting interested parties to apply.
Action: Phil
Because of concerns about the conference, we have cancelled an emergency Executive Meeting for the afternoon of Thursday 12th May 2016 if needed.
Action: Phil to organise
12. Date of next meetings:
Friday 15th July 2016
Please note that meeting scheduled for Friday 7th October 2016 will need to be moved because this clashes with ILAE in Belfast.
All meetings will be at The Holiday Inn, just off junction 15 of the M6.
All meetings will be at The Holiday Inn just off junction 15 of the M6.