The World Federation of Neurology (WFN) and the Department of Neurology of Mohamed V. Souissi University, Rabat, Morocco, announce a one-year Visiting Fellow Program for newly trained neurologists in Africa.

The Department of Neurology of MohamedV.SouissiUniversity is a WFN accredited teaching center.

The WFN has 117 member societies and aims to foster brain health worldwide, working in partnership with the World Health Organization (WHO), among others.

Project Description

Mohamed V. Souissi University would like to support the African initiative of the WFN by inviting an African colleague to participate in a one-year training course in clinical neurophysiology. The purpose is to experience the modern Moroccan medical system in an international environment, meet new colleagues and foster future cooperation.

The training course in clinical neurophysiology at the Mohamed V. Souissi University Department of Neurology will include electromyography, electroencephalography, epilepsy, neuropathy and muscle diseases. Teaching will be conducted in French.

Timeframe

The visit will take place for one academic year from September 2014 to June 2015.

Details About Support

The visiting Fellow will receive the following support:

• Reimbursement for one economy flight from the Fellow’s country of residence to Rabat and the return journey.
• Reimbursement of accommodations for the academic year.
• A monthly allowance for living expenses (food and beverage) during the academic year.
• Costs of health insurance and insurance for medical activity during the stay in Morocco (to be arranged by the applicant, the costs will be refunded).
• Note that support is provided for the visiting Fellow only, and does not include family or dependents. WFN is not responsible for financial issues other than related to the project.

Criteria for Applications

• The applicant must be a resident of a low or lower-middle income country from the African continent.
• The applicant must be born after Dec. 31,1974.
• The applicant must have recently completed his or her neurology training and be ranked first in his or her final evaluation of the last year of neurology training.

Evaluation Committee

Professor Wolfgang Grisold (Secretary Treasurer-General, WFN)

Professor Amadou Gallo Diop (WFN Trustee)

Professor Mostafa El Alaoui Faris (Head of Department Neurology and Neuropsychology, Mohamed V. Souissi University)

Professor Redouane Mrabet (President of Mohamed V SouissiUniversity)

Deadline for Application

To apply, applicants must submit their CV, a supporting statement and a letter of recommendation from the head of their department by April 21, 2014, by email to lkennedy@kenes.com

For any questions regarding your application, or to apply, please contact the administrative office of the WFN Education Committee:

Laura Kennedy
Project Coordinator – WFN
Kenes Associations Worldwide
1-3 Rue de Chantepoulet
P.O. Box 1726
CH-1211 Geneva 1
Switzerland
Email: lkennedy@kenes.com
Phone: +41 (0) 22 906 9165

By Wolfgang Grisold

Wolfgang Grisold

The EFNS and the Austrian Society of Neurology (OEGN) hosted a Patient Day on Sept. 21, at the site of the World Congress of Neurology in Vienna. It was opened by Eduard Auff, the Congress president; Vladimir Hachinski, WFN then-president; and Richard Hughes, EFNS president; signaling a high value and interest for this event.

The event was announced and publicized by media in Austria prior to the meeting.

Patient Days are important events within congresses, where distinguished speakers present new developments of the field and, where in a discussion following their presentations, attendees are able to ask questions. For the first presentation, a video presentation of a patient with a brain tumor was selected. The other disease topics were stroke, Parkinson’s disease and MS, each followed by time for discussion. The presentations were in German, and Austrian groups and associations for specific diseases (e.g. MS, stroke, Parkinson) were invited, as well as the OEGN website reps and media. About 400 patients and relatives attended and listened to the presentation by experts.

Within the EFNS, a Patient Day, in cooperation with EFNA, took place in Helsinki in 2003. It was aimed at translating the patients’ needs into a dialogue toward better medical care and quality of life and has since become a permanent feature of the meeting. Other medical specialties, in particular oncology, have regular patient days to inform, and also learn about patients’ needs.

For the World Federation of Neurology, this was a new type of meeting, aimed at including patient and caregivers, assessing their needs and receiving input to improve neurological services.

Patient days also serve to inform patients and caregivers in an efficient way regarding new developments. This is important, as patients and caregivers often get information from media and from the Internet, and they may have difficulty determining what is the most correct information. Conversely, and perhaps more important, is the fact that the medical profession needs to know what it is that patients wish to know, and what patient and caregiver questions are.

Many aspects of the relationship  of patient/caregivers with their physicians are changing.

Medicine developed from a paternalism-defined structure into a more patient-driven autonomy structure. Sometimes, the bureaucracy is overarching into an “in-between” model of physician-patient/caregiver interaction. Thus, it is more important than ever that physicians and patients find ways to communicate and work together.  Health organizations often include patient representatives on their boards, and in many European guideline committees, patient representatives are already important constituents.

Another important way to look at this kind of meeting is its role in furthering advocacy — better communicating health needs to local and national institutions and bodies. The basic source of need in all matters of health issues is the needs of patients and their caregivers, which drive the need to enable progress in medicine and in health structures. Health structures depend on general policy, and the role of advocacy is to make needs of patient/caregivers and health professionals heard.

Finally, and this is the summary of this task, informed patients will be better partners in fighting neurological disease.

We hope that the patient day, after its successful introduction in Vienna, will become a regular part of WFN Congresses.

If you need more information, contact me at wolfgang.grisold@wfneurology.org (WFN) or Tanja Weinhart (OEGN) at weinhart@admicos.com.

By Johan A. Aarli

The World Federation of Neurology (WFN) was founded in 1957 in Brussels. Although there had been international medical congresses before it, the London Congress  of Medicine 1913 was a landmark in the general acceptance of neurology.

The First International Neurological Congress was held in 1931 in Berne. Subsequent meetings took place in London, Copenhagen, Paris and Lisbon. The plurality of several international congresses of neurosciences was one of the reasons the Brussels Congress in 1957 was named The First International Congress of Neurological Sciences.

The movers were two Americans and one European: Houston Merritt, Pearce Bailey Jr. and Ludo van Bogaert, respectively. In 1956, Merritt and Bailey proposed a world neurological federation at a meeting of the AmericanAcademy of Neurology. The National Institute of Neurological Diseases and Blindness (NINDB), National Institutes of Health, U.S., offered an annual grant of $126,190 (U.S.) for five years in order to get the federation started. By the end of 1962, the WFN Secretariat had received more than $500,000 from the original NINDB grant. Thirty-eight  national delegates met in Brussels in 1957.

Van Bogaert from Antwerp, Belgium, was a respected neurologist, and the leading neuropathologist of his time.  He was elected WFN president, Macdonald Critchley and Auguste Tournay were elected vice presidents and Pearce Bailey was elected secretary-treasurer general.

Van Bogaert established the first Project Commissions (later renamed Research Groups) consisting of international leaders of various sectors of neurology. A series of commissions were established, such as the Research Group on Extrapyramidal Disease organized by Melvin Yahr.

Van Bogaert believed that it was time to create a new and separate organization of the Research Groups. The name of the association would be the World Association of Neurological Commissions (WANC).

There was agreement that Adolphe Franceschetti should become the WANC president and David Klein vice president and secretary-treasurer general.  Van Bogaert’s successor as president, Macdonald Critchley, thought this was wrong, and that the research arm was essential for WFN in order to survive. Van Bogaert’s presidency was successful, but ended in a financial crisis. He had described the three elements of his WFN rescue plan: the increase in annual dues, a decentralization plan and the new organization for the Problem Commissions. The differences of opinion had been dramatic, and John Walton’s proposal was to create a new organizational unit of the WFN — the Research Committee. The Problem Commissions were renamed Research Groups and organized in the new Research Committee.

Critchley became the next president. During his presidency, WANC became an integral part of the WFN. How could WFN now survive? Critchley was able to see that every cloud had a silver lining. He instilled a feeling of pioneer optimism in the organization. The work of the WFN not only continued, it flourished in spite of a miserable economy. The orientation of the federation remained truly international, harmonious and stimulating.

The reason lay in the vitality of the organization. No new administrative initiatives could be taken, but the activity that had been introduced in the Research Groups was high. How to balance the budget of the WFN?

Were the annual WFN dues too high? Since they had remained unchanged at $2 for 20 years despite inflation, the Finance Committee recommended the dues be raised to $5 on the basis of the WFN’s state of bankruptcy. The WFN accountants had to audit all financial statements of the WFN, including those of all Research Groups, and had to urge the national societies that were delinquent in paying their dues.

The Finance Committee also suggested that a Publications Subcommittee of WFN be formed and chaired by Professor Robert Daroff. The subcommittee was charged with development of resources from WFN-sponsored journals, starting with the contracts of the Journal of the Neurological Sciences, Journal of Neuroimmunology, Acta Neuropathologica and the WFN’s World Neurology newsletter. It also was decided to have the WFN accountants shift from a cash to an accrual method of accounting commencing  Jan. 1, 1987. Any further increase in the number of WFN officers, which would progressively jeopardize WFN’s finances, was strongly discouraged.

The WFN Finance Committee recommended that a Fundraising Subcommittee be formed, chaired by Professor Helmut Lechner to investigate. Registration fees, advertisements, exhibit hall rentals and sponsorships were new sources of income.

John Walton took over as the new WFN president in 1998. One of the most central steps of the subsequent WFN re-organization was to establish a corporate status for the association. The impending appointment of officers based in different countries and continents made the creation of a new secretariat pressing. The committee structure had to be reviewed. Financial planning systems, including itemized annual budgets, were introduced and expenditure monitored by the treasurer and reported to the Finance Committee.

It was recommended to separate the offices of secretary-general and treasurer. Following the World Congress in Vancouver, Canada, in 1993, 50 percent of the profits were retained by the host society and 50 percent were transferred to the funds of the WFN, in return for the WFN administrative costs involved in planning the congress and program.

The WFN income increased because of the increase in annual dues and the royalties from its scientific journals. Developments in neurosciences had increased, and effective new drugs were available.

James Toole was the WFN secretary-treasurer general in Richard Masland’s administration. They managed to have the new WFN newsletter, World Neurology, survive, and it became an important communication medium for the federation. In 1989, Toole became the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Neurological Sciences.

The U.S. Congress in concert with President George H.W. Bush, declared the 1990s the “Decade of the Brain.” In response to a request by the Congress, the Advisory Council of the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke produced an implementation plan, focusing on 14 major disease categories in which neurological research gives promise of rapid progress for the coming decade. The plan called for increased allocations for basic and clinical neurosciences of $190 million in the first year, rising to $385 million per year in the latter part of the decade.

Jun Kimura was the first vice president in James Toole’s administration. He also chaired the Constitution and Bylaws Committee during the critical transition period from the “old” organization to the incorporated WFN. Many of these important projects stemmed from the Strategic Planning Meeting held in St. Albans in 2000, making steady progress in achieving some of the missions agreed upon during those intense discussions.

Johan Aarli had two main initiatives as president of the WFN. He articulated the need to study and develop creative methods to implement improved delivery and increased rural distribution of neurological health, “The Africa Initiative.” Second, he was determined to bring into the WFN the 1.2 billion people within The People’s Republic of China. This took place at the WFN’s Silver Jubilee in 2007.

The Council of Delegates remains the ruling body of the federation. WFN must hold an annual general meeting which all member societies are entitled to attend. It consists of the national delegates of the national neurologic associations. There is a quorum of a meeting of the Council of Delegates if the number of authorized delegates personally present is at least 15.

What’s in a Name?

From 1993, the president, the secretary treasurer general, the first vice president and the chairman of the research committee constituted the WFN Management Committee. Their function was to advise the Council of Delegates and the various committees of the issues of policy and day-to-day management. The WFN Steering Committee was disbanded when the new WFN was organized in 2001.

The WFN Trustees

One major element of the new WFN is the appointment of trustees: the president, the first vice president, the secretary-treasurer general, and three who are elected in accordance with the articles of association, and up to two co-opted individuals. The trustees are charity trustees who have control of the federation and its property and funds.

Two WFN members have contributed to this account of WFN’s history: Noshir Wadia: In Service of the WFN, and Jun Kimura: Internal Struggle in Kyoto.