Report on 1st meeting of the Critical Physio Network Organising Committee

We had the first meeting of the Critical Physiotherapy Network Organising Committee (neatly abbreviated to CPN-OC).

You’ll remember we had six fabulously enthusiastic volunteers: Barbara Gibson (Canada), Jenny Setchell (Australia), Nicky Wilson & Gwyn Owen (UK), Simon Kirkegaard (Denmark), with me – Dave Nicholls (New Zealand) – in the Chair.

The plan for the first meeting was to get the video conferencing software to work (why is it that the technology is always the biggest stress!), and to meet each other.  I thought that if we could just achieve that, we would have achieved something quite momentous.

I’m pleased to say we did achieve our objective, but with only minutes to spare!

Barbara, myself and Jenny (calling in from Cairns rather than her normal home in Brisbane), could see and hear each other perfectly, but Nicky was having problems hearing us and had to move to a different computer after half-an-hour of frustration.  We knew Gwyn would be joining us a little late, but we didn’t have Simon until five minutes from the end.  Thanks to Daylight Saving, I’d managed to give Simon the wrong start time!

However…all that notwithstanding, we did have 10 minutes or so to say hello to each other and to formally launch the Committee.

We also had time to make some important decisions.  We agreed that:

1. We wanted the meetings to have a formal structure – with a proper agenda, minutes and papers for discussion when it was relevant.
2. Our first priority would be to propose and establish the aims and objectives of the Critical Physiotherapy Network, including fundamental things like our particular interpretation of the word ‘critical,’ our values and principles, and our long-term vision.  Our thought is that if we got the groundwork right, a lot of the governance and organisational detail would be easier to sort out.  We agreed that the job of setting up the aims and objectives might take some time, but an hour spent on it now might save us all days of work later on.
3. After establishing the aims and objectives of the group, we would move on to the Terms of Reference for the Organising Committee, membership arrangements, fee structures (if we’re going to have them), etc.

We decided to have monthly meetings, and to hold them on the last Friday of the month (New Zealand time).  We’re also going to stick with Scopia as the video conferencing software for now.  At first glance it seems a lot more stable than Skype, and it comes with tools that other similar tools don’t have.

So our next meeting will be on Friday 28th November (Auckland time).  We’ll post up an agenda in advance and minutes will be available soon after.

POST UPDATE: CPN members can access copies of agenda & minutes here