International Nurse Specialist Group-CF Update

Last June we had our Annual General Meeting in Copenhagen, during the European CF conference. There was a huge participation of Nurses from many countries. Currently our mailing list includes 248 CF Nurses from 20 different countries of Europe, America, Asia and Australia.

Great news is that our Chair, Susan Madge, was elected as a member of the Board of the European CF Society. This is an acknowledgment to her and to the hard work she has done setting up the Group, increasing the awareness of Nurses in the CF healthcare professionals’ community, and to the increasing authoritativeness of our profession in the CF field.

During the last few years the Group has received support from Chiron, in the form of the “Best Care Scholarship Award” (see www.cfnurses.net for more details). As many of you will know, Novartis have recently taken over Chiron. We are currently in discussion with representatives from this company in the hope that they will be able to continue this support.

We anticipate that from next year the support will be continued by Novartis, which will made available as three Nursing Poster Awards. These will be awarded to the best nursing posters among those presented at the next European CF Conference in Turkey, June 2007.

The Programme for the Conference will include many sessions and subjects relevant to Nurses. In particular, there will be:

• Nurse-led Symposia (Adult life, Infection Control, Managing Care)
• Nursing Case Presentation Workshop
• Nursing poster-based Workshops: “Patient, parent and family education” and “Interdisciplinary collaboration in CF teams”

We encourage you to present the results of your research and to submit as many abstracts as you can so that we can have many more Nurse speakers! The deadline for abstract submission is January 27, 2007. Visit www.europeancfconference.org for more information.