The European Parkinson’s Disease Association (EPDA), the umbrella organization of European PD associations, has lots of information, including links to their members. In case you would like to find the national PD association in your country and see their activities, go to http://www.epda.eu.com/members.

March has almost ended and it is springtime!

A picture from the Keukenhof, the famous spring garden in the Netherlands, every year from end March to end May.

But did you also know that in March:

-          on the 6^th CPLOL’s European Day of Speech-language therapy was celebrated very successfully in many countries;

-          on the 8^th the 100th anniversary of International Women's Day was celebrated;

-          the public NetQues website was launched: www.netques.eu;

-          the EC needed one and a half day in Bergen on the 12^th and 13^th to prepare the General

Assembly, while snow and rain tried to keep us inside;

-          our Irish colleagues and many others celebrated St Patrick’s Day on the 17^th;

-          and on the 20^th ‘la Journée de la Francophonie ’ was celebrated all over the world.

You could read this and more on Twitter in CPLOL tweets, where CPLOL already has more than 90 followers.

Overall March seems to be a very popular month for celebrations. When I started paying attention I noticed that the 21^st was International Anti-discrimination Day, the 22^nd World Water Day, the 23^rd World Meteorological Day, the 24^th World Tuberculosis Day and in the United States the 25^th was National Cerebral Palsy Awareness Day. And so on……

However, relevant for our profession are the following dates:

-          11 April is World Parkinson’s Day

-          16 April is World Voice Day

-          18 April is the European Patients’ Rights Day

-          9 May is Europe Day

-          21 June is World ALS Day

-          26 September is the European Day of Languages,

-          22 October is International Stuttering Awareness Day

And our congress in The Hague is only 14 months away!

March, 2011:

Dear friends,

On our EU-day of speech-language therapy, I was on my way home from a congress in the United States. In between I managed to send out tweets referring to the websites of quite a few member associations, who have published information about their way of celebrating the EU-day. This does not replace our current reports about the EU-day, but it hopefully generates more attention from our (currently 66) followers and inspires others to celebrate this day with us.

I was in the US for my work to join a congress San Antonio (Texas), the annual international and multidisciplinary scientific congress of the Dysphagia Research Society (DRS), dedicated to oropharyngeal and oesophageal dysphagia. DRS congresses are held in the USA or Canada and the majority of presentations and participants are American and Japanese. This year 145 presentations and posters were from North America (45%), Asia (23%), Europe (19%), South-America (8%) and Australia/New Zealand (5%). There were plans to host DRS in 2012 in Europe, but that is now unlikely to happen, because since this year we can join the European Society for Swallowing Disorders (ESSD). This organisation is a continuation of what was know as the EGDG (European Study Group for Dysphagia and Globus). The ESSD intends to be more open and interesting for SLTs interested in dysphagia. And its first congress under the new name will be held on 9 and 10 September 2011 in Leiden, the Netherlands (20 minutes by direct train from Schiphol). The deadline for abstract submission is 15 May and more information can be found on their website. The next ESSD congress will be end 2012 in Barcelona and in 2013 combined with the IALP congress in Turin. Relevant for researchers: also all abstracts of ESSD congresses will be published in the scientific journal Dysphagia.

Talking European (multidisciplinary) societies, there are more that include our profession, for example:

·         the European League of Stuttering Associations (ELSA)

·         Association Internationale Aphasie (AIA)

Please keep us informed about other European societies related to SLT and their congresses and if you visit one, remember to advertise for our own congress in May 2012 in The Hague. You can ask for leaflets by sending an e-mail to congress@cplol.eu.

Meanwhile the preparation of the General Assembly is in progress. The EC will be busy with it in her meeting on 12-13 March in Bergen, hometown of Gro Hartveit. So we hope to see you all in May for the commission meetings and GA in Nyborg. All relevant documents will soon be available online.

January, 2011:

Dear colleagues and friends,

Last weekend the executive committee had her first meeting of 2011 and thanks to Raffaella Citro we met in Rome. Four of us who did not have to leave directly early Sunday morning ended up at noon on Piazza San Pietro to receive the blessing of the Pope, while standing in the sun. I am not a catholic myself; nevertheless I consider this a good beginning of another CPLOL year. And although we’re already in the third week of January, I wish you good health and lots of success and happiness in 2011!
This EC meeting took longer than previous ones, because many projects needed to be discussed and planned, like proposals for the General Assembly in Nyborg (the convocation will go out next week), the organization of NetQues and the congress in 2012. CPLOL has grown substantially during the past years and this has consequences for our functioning and means of communication, which we will discuss at the GA in May.

To stay in line with today’s social media, the EC decided to make a good start by becoming active on Twitter. So since last week everyone can follow CPLOL on Twitter; find us at http://twitter.com/cplol_eu. For the time being I will feed this account myself and try to send out tweets on a regular basis. And CPLOL follows her member associations, delegates, individual SLTs, the European Union, ASHA etcetera.
In the first week of January I made my personal account and started experimenting with Twitter and I am still busy finding out new possibilities. Then others started to ask me if I am also active on Facebook or LinkedIn. Well, I am not, because I always thought it would be a waste of time….. Or am I mistaken? Please share with us your own experiences with social media on Twitter or by good old e-mail to president@cplol.eu.
 

December, 2010:

Dear friends,

How was 2010 for you? Looking back, as most people do at this time of the year, we all have been very busy. In 2010 CPLOL was finally successful in getting the NetQues project funded by the European Union. That’s a major achievement to be recorded in our archives.
For me, this was also the year of understanding the buzzword ‘2.0’. Web 2.0, Media 2.0 etc. refers to the current phase in digital communication, in which we, the end-users, also participate in the production of information (now even Web 3.0 is developing). I am not an expert, nor a heavy user (yet), but I am highly fascinated by what is happening in the ways we can organize our digital communication. Our children maintain online contact with each other as much as they can, because they are early adapters by nature. In our personal lives we can hardly imagine not using the Internet to keep updated with each other and share information via e-mail of course, but increasingly via weblogs, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Flickr or Wikipedia. Also professionally, we can now select information from countless sources accustomed to our needs and preferences. And the ways in which we can work online with our clients (telehealth, e-health) are developing in high speed, also in the speech-language domain. It is difficult to imagine the possibilities in the coming years. For example, could you imagine a few years ago that working with a touch screen tablet-PC would be easily available for every consumer? It also implies that we, as trained professionals, are constantly challenged to keep our knowledge and services up to date. Currently, you can follow profession-related developments of several of our member associations on Twitter: the RCSLT  and the NVLF.
(I have checked the websites, but please let me know if I have overlooked one). Are you a follower yet? I would be very interested to share your opinion on this how to use these social media for CPLOL.

This year we have a serious winter in all parts of Europe. I made the picture in Nijmegen, my hometown, showing bicycles of course. We’ll have a very white Christmas.

I hope you will all enjoy the holidays with friends and family, everyone in his own way. Last month it was 20 years ago that John Lennon died. I wish you all Happy Holidays with his lyrics:
“A very Merry Xmas
And a happy New Year
Let's hope it's a good one
Without any fear”

Hanneke

November 24, 2010:

Dear friends,

Going to an ASHA convention includes all preparations to get into the USA. My ESTA declaration was still valid and at the Immigration desk I was able to explain why I wanted to enter the USA. But at arrival I stupidly had forgotten that I had saved an apple in my hand luggage, which is not allowed and forced several kind security officers to spend time on my luggage, only for an apple. With the upcoming Thanksgiving Day and millions of Americans getting on planes next week, new safety measures with body scans were on the national news for several days, discussing whether it would make the queues on the airports shorter of longer. Luckily, the announcement of a royal wedding in the UK was responsible for some uplifting reports.

This year the ASHA convention was from 18 to 20 November in Philadelphia and I was told that 12,000 SLTs attended. That is huge, despite the fact that this is about 10% of the total number of ASHA members. On several occasions I had the opportunity to explain to individual colleagues what kind of organization CPLOL is. While doing that, I became more aware of how others may look at our organisation. It made me realize how unique the information is that we have gathered on our website through the years and that much more colleagues and students than we think, might find it helpful. But at the same time I started to worry: is the information on our website enough and up to date? When working from the inside you tend not to notice unless you have a reason to check. How often do you look at our website and notify our webmaster which information needs updating? In other words, discussing the internal structure, as the executive committee is doing right now with the input of a dedicated working group, is vital. But keeping contact with the world outside Europe is similarly important. The leaders of ASHA, the largest organization in our profession, can easily afford to welcome colleagues from outside the USA. But I felt a true and sincere desire to cooperate with us and other associations from all over the globe in the development of our profession. Moreover, ASHA introduced a new Special Interest Group nr. 17 introduced in Philadelphia, called ‘Global Issues in Communication Sciences and Related Disorders’ (http://www.asha.org/Members/divs/division17.htm). I sure hope that I may present CPLOL’s work next year to a larger audience when this group organizes her own meeting.

Last year was my first visit to the ASHA convention and this summer I was still wondering whether it would be useful enough to spend the time and money on going again. Now I am convinced that it is imperative that CPLOL is represented here every year and I am honoured to do the job.

November 16, 2010:

Dear friends,

In between CPLOL meetings it is hard to remain committed to any CPLOL work. We all know that and struggle with the frustration. I wrote my first blog a few weeks ago when we had our meetings in Paris. Now being engaged with my normal routine it is much more difficult. That is probably exemplary for all CPLOL work: you are very much inspired while working together. The first day after returning home, you miss everyone dearly and are happy with every ‘safe home and thank you’ message in your mailbox. But then your every day life, relatives and colleagues demand your presence and attention. Even worse, they have no idea about your CPLOL world and if you keep talking about it, they might get jealous as well. So soon you start to forget or postpone what you promised to do. Not because you want to, but you simply feel disconnected from the group, like a “Borg from its collective” (if you don’t know what I am yoking about, it’s a Star Trek expression:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7QhsmXG5ngU&feature=related).

Being active for CPLOL is important, but still it’s voluntary. CPLOL does not have the financial means to compensate for the time committed by delegates, except from paying travel and accommodation. So it takes motivation and discipline to finish CPLOL activities on time, but in busy periods this is seriously conflicting with our social life and our paid work. Of course we respect that from each other. No one has to justify that his work or private matters have higher priority. I sometimes do when I am frustrated and want others to acknowledge my time limits, but usually I feel embarrassed afterwards.

In general, the 5 to 6 months in between meetings is more than enough time to accomplish what has been agreed in commissions and working groups. Still, it proves difficult to keep everyone going. We have discussed this matter several times in the EC. One technique is to continue e-mail contact on a regular basis and to specify the subject in more detail in the title of your message. Michèle started experimenting with that for the Professional Practice commission and at least it works for me. Another technique is to use Skype for free and easy online video contact and to reconnect efficiently (if you’re still looking for it, go to http://www.skype.com). Taking care of ‘the collective’ is the prime reason for this blog as well.

Meanwhile, the preparations for the GA in May 2011 have started. As always, the election of EC members is on the agenda and this time we need candidates for the posts of vice-president for the Education Commission and treasurer. That is clearly more consistent work than a regular delegate usually has, but surely this EC is a very supportive collective to work with. Moreover, any delegate who secretly enjoys being popular, should consider becoming the next treasurer, because everybody loves that colleague who takes care of the bill.

October 24, 2010

Dear colleagues,

After being president for a year already, I thought it would be time to start a president’s blog. Meeting each other only twice a year is too infrequent to give updates on what I notice from my current position that may interest CPLOL delegates. English is only my second language, so you have to deal with my own style, that I have developed through the years (and Michèle Kaufmann kindly translates my texts into French). Nevertheless, I hope I can interest and amuse you with my blog.

One of the things I wanted to share with you since this summer is the IALP congress in Athens at the end of August. The EC hardly ever meets in August, because it’s the holiday season, but the main purpose was to meet the executive board of IALP and to present CPLOL’s work at the congress. Last year, at our own congress in Ljubljana, we had invited the IALP board and we agreed to meet at each other’s congresses from then on. And because we received the message at the 3^rd of August that the EU had approved the NetQues project, we had a very busy EC meeting, so the timing was perfect. In between, we had lunch with the IALP board, for some of us a reunion, for others to get acquainted. It was like looking in a mirror: from all over the world the same kind of people who enjoy spending their free time on the development of the profession by taking the lead. But there was more. CPLOL was named several times during the opening, both Raffaella Citro and myself (replacing Aileen) had a presentation about CPLOL’s projects and many people were exited to hear about NetQues. After the closing ceremony, I ran into a few CPLOL colleagues, who had also noticed the difference with the previous IALP congress in 2007, remarking that CPLOL had really been buzzing around. So for those of you who weren’t there, “CPLOL was here”.

After Athens, NetQues became even more important, because we needed to prepare the installation meeting with the 65 partners. But we were not fully prepared for European bureaucracy. It turned out that the officers in Brussels requested details we suddenly had to arrange, e.g. that CPLOL needs to have a SIREN number in France. FNO, on our request, immediately came into action and succeeded, despite the strikes in Paris. The advantage of course is that large projects help to further professionalize our organisation and indeed can only be successful if prepared and monitored in full detail. This week we had this installation meeting and like every new project it took its time to get in everyone’s head in the right way and develop from a plan into coordinated actions. Everything worked out very well and I was impressed by the amount and the quality of the work that was accomplished in one and half day. Again I want to thank the colleagues who made this possible by writing a successful application: Aileen Patterson, Pirkko Rautakoski, Anja Lowit and Hilde Chantrain. When talking ‘spending free time for the profession’, they are this year’s winners!

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