Winter is here to stay for the next few months; personally, I love this time of the year. BARNA conference 2011 is 7.5 months away and what a conference we are planning! Next year will be the 25th BARNA conference, and so we feel we need to celebrate this in true BARNA style.
We are planning to return to the Clarendon Suites and there are a number of very good reasons for this. The Clarendon Suites on Hagley Road in Birmingham is where BARNA began, and it seems fitting to return there for our 25th conference. The first BARNA conference was organised and held to see if there was enough interest in this speciality to establish an association. The first conference was a success, and as a result of that, ARNA was born (to start with, we were known as the Anaesthetic and Recovery Nurses Association). The British bit was added later. First, ARNA and later, BARNA have known a wide variety of characters that have been involved in this organisation and have facilitated the growth and development of this organisation to what we see today.
We are always looking at ways of developing and improving BARNA for the benefit of our members, and through our conferences and Journal, the benefit of our patients. ARNA was an innovation when it was first developed and has continued to evolve over the last quarter of a century to the BARNA we have today.
I have started developing a family tree. It is interesting to see where my family has come from, and as always you will find something you never knew. I would like to see us develop something similar for BARNA, a timeline of our past and present, giving us a springboard for moving into the future evolution of BARNA.
The BARNA committee is working hard to plan its best conference yet, and as such we wish to engage the assistance of your membership. We would like to hear from anyone who was at one of the first conferences – do you remember the topics discussed, do you have photos from the early conferences and do you keep in touch with anyone from the early conferences? We would like to look into the BARNA history and have some posters of this for the conference. If you have anything that you think might be of interest to us; please e-mail info@barna.co.uk.
There will be more information about BARNA 2011 in future editions of the Journal, newsletter and on our website. That is all for now, folks. It is time for me to go and continue my preparations for Christmas. I wish you all a very merry Christmas and a happy, peaceful new year.
We are looking forward to celebrating the 25th anniversary of BARNA with you all in Birmingham.
