PRIOR TO THE ICS 2008 meeting in Cairo, an invitation was sent to leading nurses in Egypt working in the field of bladder and bowel care. This invitation was taken up by 20 Egyptian nurses, led by Nadia Seif from Cairo, all of whom were working in academia and a number of whom had carried out continence research.
The meeting on Sunday, 19 October was a very lively exchange of ideas surrounding continence care in a number of different countries. This clearly showed that while nurses around the world teach and deliver the same care, this may be done in different ways and around different frameworks of education and care delivery.
It was particularly interesting to see just how much research was being carried out in Egypt by the group who attended the meeting. It was also of interest to note how difficult they found it to get their work published. It was, moreover, amazing to learn from them that this was the first all nurse-led meeting that this senior group of academics had attended in their part of the world, since meetings there are usually medically run.
Finding such an enthusiastic group of nurses in Egypt and taking into account a previous experience in Brazil where there are a number of nurses working in the field who were never really identified until two years ago, it is clear that there is a need for the ICS and its nursing membership to identify other such unknown groups. This is an area on which the ICS Nursing Committee will be focusing attention in the next few years.
In addition to attending the Nurses’ Meeting, our Egyptian colleagues attended a number of courses and workshops, supported by an education grant from the ICS Trustees. This was greatly appreciated by both the nurses and the Nursing Committee and I would personally like to thank the previous Board of Trustees in supporting this group of relatively poorly paid nurses, thereby enabling them to attend and benefit from this meeting.
Mandy Wells
Nursing Committee Chair