National Brain Councils (NBC) & National Action Groups (NAG)

News

• The last meeting to encourage the creation of a NBC in 2011 took place on the 9th December in Riga. Find out more from the meeting report
• Czech Brain Council was established on the 1st November 2011.
  The founding organizations are: Czech Neuropsychopharmacological Society, Czech Psychiatric Society, Czech Neurological Society, Czech Neuroscience Society, Centre for Mental Health Care Development (NGO), Kolumbus (organization of patients with mental illness) and Sympathea (national organization of relatives of people with mental illness)
• Doc. MUDr. Pavel Mohr, PhD was elected as the first President.
• A meeting of the Network of NBC/NAGs took place in Brussels on the 3rd October 2011. A report can be found here
  On the following day all the country representatives took part in the meeting launching the updated study "Cost of Disorders of the Brain in Europe" in the EP, where they also had a chance to meet with MEPs from their respective countries whom they had invited prior to the meeting.
  More about the meeting and the study itself can be found on the dedicated website:
  www.europeanbraincouncil.org/projects/CDBE/2010/ 
• On the 13th September an idea of creating a Bulgarian Brain Council was discussed at a meeting in Sofia. The meeting was well attended and the government was represented by the deputy Health Minister. There was a great interest from media and a wide coverage following the meeting. The report from the meeting will be available soon.
• EBC representatives visited Switzerland's capital Bern to meet with representatives of Swiss scientific societies, patient organizations and industry. During the meeting that took place on the 18th May it was decided to form a Swiss Action Group for Brain. Find out more
• EBC met in Helsinki to discuss a creation of a Finnish Brain Council. The meeting took place on the 7th March 2011. See the report here
• 2011 started with the meeting in Bucharest. There was a lot of interest to form a Romanian Brain Council during the meeting on the 8th February. Many local media picked up on that. Meeting report
• Belgium:
  • Brain Awareness Week: Belgium organized 15 events, see the BBC website for more information. On the occasion of BAW 2010, in cooperation with the BBC la Libre Belgique dedicated a special issue to “The Brain”. Click here to access the issue (PDF).
  • Belgian Brain Congress will be organized on September 17th -18th 2010: more information can be found here.
  • BBC web page is more and more visited with almost 10.000 hits in February 2010 compared to 3000 hits in February 2009 and 2000 in February 2008.
• A meeting encouraging the creation of the Hellenic Action Group took place in Athens in late March. Click here for the meeting report.
• A meeting was held in Dublin in March 2010 to launch an Irish Action Group. A report from the meeting is accessible here.
• Representatives of six Portuguese scientific societies (Neurology, Psychiatry, Neurosciences, Neurosurgery, Neuropediatrics and Neuroradiology) met in Lisbon on 6th November 2009 to discuss the first draft of the Statutes of the Portuguese Brain Council. A second assembly was scheduled on the 29th of January 2010 to conclude the final version of the Statutes that will be submitted to undergo legal approval as is required by the Portuguese law.
  
  For more details, please see the following links:
  6th November 2009 meeting report
  29th January 2010 meeting report

• A meeting to discuss the formation of a Swedish National Action Group was held at the office of the Sveriges Läkarförbund in Stockholm in November 2009. Click here to see the report.

• The meeting of Polish Action Group (PAG) was held on 20th November 2009 with the aim of discussing transformation of PAG into Polish Brain Council. Please follow the link with meeting report for more details.

• On September 25th 2009, a meeting of the National Action Groups and National Brain Councils was held in Brussels.  Co-chaired by Professor Monica di Luca, Italian Brain Council, and Professor Roland Pochet, Belgian Brain Council, the meeting brought together representatives of 15 countries to discuss their experiences and agree on joint action.  The most important new development was the creation of a Network of National Action Groups and Brain Councils which elected two representatives as Observers on the Board of the EBC.  These were Roland Pochet of the Belgian Brain Council and Jure Bon of the Slovenian Brain Council.