Preview by: Richard Davenport, ABN Meetings Secretary
Conference details: ABN Annual Conference 2020. Weds-Thurs 13-15 May 2020 BIC Bournemouth
After the success of the Edinburgh Conference in 2019, the ABN turns 366 miles south (458 miles should you be mad/carbon unfriendly enough to drive it) to alight in Bournemouth, where the sun shines for 7.7 hours a day in the summer (almost as much as Edinburgh), making it the ideal place for retirement and eating ice cream (allegedly 2000 day). Bournemouth was where Mr Rolls (of Rolls Royce) became the unlucky first Brit to die in a plane crash in 1910 and where over 50 years later, the first arrests after the Great Train Robbery were made, although neither influenced the decision to have this year’s conference in this lovely Dorset city, home of some fabulous Victorian architecture.
We have a pre-meeting day on Tuesday 12th May with the Foundation Doctor Session and the ABNT Registrar Training day; highlights will include local neurologists discussing their approach to weakness and Jenny Vaughan discussing medical interactions with the Law.
The ABN Annual conference 2020 will formally start the following day and we are delighted that Neil Scolding will drop in from neighbouring Bristol to deliver the 2020 ABN Medallist lecture, “Neuroinflammation: moving on”. Our other guest lecturers include Dr Bart de Strooper delivering the Gordon Holmes lecture on “The cellular phase of Alzheimer’s Disease” and Dr William Howlett from (not so neighbouring) Tanzania delivering the Practical Neurology lecture on “Neurology in Africa”.
The plenary sessions for 2020 include sessions on pain and headache, neurotechnology, traumatic brain injury, emergency neurology and a video session. We have six parallel platform sessions, featuring the highest scoring 36 abstracts including two fabulous “late breaking” presentations, selected from over 300 submitted abstracts. There will be two guided poster sessions as well as the hotly contested case presentations competition. The CPC will round things off in style as always, another perfectly straightforward case, with no twists, turns, red herrings or booby traps.
The Special Interest Groups offer an excellent opportunity to hear updates in the field, discuss interesting cases and meet with friends and future clinical and research collaborators. The sessions will run on Wednesday and Thursday mornings and this year include, Multiple Sclerosis & Neuroinflammation, Cognitive Disorders, Acute Neurology, Neuro-ophthalmology, Traumatic Brain Injury, Peripheral Nerve and the British Neurotoxin Network.
The Annual General Meeting will be held on Thursday 14th May at 13:45. The Gala dinner will be held in the Pavilion, a bit of 1920s glamour, with our President Prof David Burn the centre stage attraction with a keenly awaited (and timed) speech. The following morning sees the fun run and yoga session (one or the other please). Come and join us for a fabulous 3 days of education, fun and (undoubtedly) sunshine.
