Dear Health Care Professional,
Taking care of patients with non-epileptic seizures (NES) can produce a mixture of emotions. The condition is poorly understood and still characterised by many uncertainties and controversies. While scientific publications can offer useful insights, they don’t make it easy for health care professionals to share their own personal experiences – the good and bad – about patients, the condition and its treatment. Such accounts could provide an extremely useful, additional resource for health care professionals who are keen to improve their own understanding and management of NES. They could also help those writing the accounts to clarify their thoughts and feelings about NES.
Invitation
We are approaching you in the hope that you will be happy to spend a few minutes to contribute to a book intended as a forum in which health care professionals can share their own experiences and feelings about patients with NES. We think that other health care professional would be interested in your story, told in your own words. Your writing may contribute to a new book in the Brainstorms Series published by Oxford University Press entitled “Non-Epileptic Seizures in Our Experience: Accounts of Health Care Professionals”
What should I write about?
You can write about anything you feel is important, for example:
• The challenges and frustrations that you have encountered when managing a patient with NES.
• If your heart sinks when you know you are going to see a patient with NES.
• How you manage your own emotions when you see someone with NES.
• How you diagnose the condition and what are your feelings towards it.
• How you deal with uncertainty about the diagnosis.
• How you explain the condition.
• What your perception is of the condition.
• What treatment you suggest.
• What the most likely cause of the condition is.
• What are the triggers of NES
• How you use additional resources, such as pamphlets.
• Any particularly positive or negative encounters with a patient with NES.
• What you believe your role is in treating patients with NES, compared to those with epilepsy or mixed seizures.
• How your attitudes towards patients with epilepsy differ to those with NES.
• Any advice you may have for other professionals who treat NES.
• Which therapeutic approaches you have found to be useful for NES.
• How the care for patients with NES could be improved.
• How your colleagues react to NES.
• What change you have noticed in the treatment of and attitudes towards NES in the medical community.
Who can contribute?
For this book we are keen to be inclusive and collect writings from around the world and from professionals working in a range of different specialities. We want to capture the views and experiences of physicians (neurologists, psychiatrists, emergency medicine specialists, general practitioners), nurses, paramedics, social workers, therapists, EEG technicians, psychologists and other professions. We hope to capture the perspectives of those who have worked for a long time with patients with this condition as well as those who have only come across a single patient.
Who is this book for?
Your writing will be used for educational purposes, for instance helping other professionals to better understand the condition. Your writings may also provide insights for patients with the condition helping them to realise how professionals feel and the problems that they encounter when managing this condition. The new book will be published as part of the Brainstorm Series, which will be freely available for sale. You can have a look at other titles that have already been published in the series on Amazon or the Oxford University Press website.
Will my contribution be confidential?
In keeping with previous books in the Brainstorms series, we are keen to keep your personal details confidential. To ensure this, we will not link your name with your particular contribution to the book. We will pseudonymise person and place names when necessary. However, if you choose for us to do so, we will acknowledge your contribution in a specific section of the book along with the names of others who have contributed. Due to the anonymous format of the book, we hope that it will allow you to be open and honest, and say how you truly feel about patients with NES and their seizures.
How can I contribute?
If you are willing to contribute, could you please either:
1. Complete and submit the online consent and contribution form which can be found at https://goo.gl/forms/zvpkZXx1V5EbENtS2 . If the link doesn't take you to the form, please try copying and pasting the address into your address bar. Please be aware, this webpage cannot be saved so if your writing is deleted BEFORE you press SUBMIT it will be lost. Therefore, you may want to write off-line (for example in a word processing program such as Microsoft Word) then cut and paste into the box below.
2. Contact Gregg Rawlings at ghrawlings1@sheffield.ac.uk who will send you the consent and contribution form for you to complete and return.
We would greatly appreciate it if you could also pass along the details of this invitation to any of your colleagues who you think may also be interested in contributing.
If you have any questions please contact Gregg Rawlings at ghrawlings1@sheffield.ac.uk.
Thank you very much.
Kind Regards,
Professor Markus Reuber,
Honorary Consultant Neurologist
Dr Gregg Rawlings,
Trainee Clinical Psychologist
Professor Steven Schachter,
Professor of Neurology