Dr Nigel Speight, paediatric medical adviser to the ME Association, will be guest speaker at an open meeting of the Edinburgh ME Self-Help Group this Saturday (October 19).
After the group has spent a few minutes working through the details of its Annual General Meeting, Dr Speight will take to the stage for his talk – which has been given the upbeat title of “A Speight of Little Victories”.
The meeting will be held in the Lammermuir Hall of St Cuthbert's Parish Church, 5 Lothian Road, Edinburgh, beginning at 2pm. Doors open at 1.30pm.
Dr Speight has been a consultant paediatrician living in Durham for over 25 years and has seen a large number of cases of childhood ME. He has played – and still plays – a major role in rescuing children from care proceedings in his own area and all over the country. He spoke about the broad outlines of this work when he was on the MEA panel of speakers at our annual ‘ME Question Time' in Cornwall earlier this month.
He was on the Chief Medical Officer’s Working Party, which reported in 2002, and also gave evidence to the All Party Parliamentary Group on ME Inquiry into the state of NHS services for people with ME/CFS (chaired by Dr Ian Gibson), which reported in March 2010.
On three occasions, Dr Speight spoke to the currently disbanded Cross Party Group on ME in the Scottish Parliament. Recently – along with 25 representatives from 13 countries – he was a member of the International Consensus Panel which in 2011 published the International Consensus Criteria for diagnosing and researching ME; this document developed themes that emerged in the earlier Canadian Consensus Criteria.
There is parking at the multi-storey car park on Castle Terrace and on-street parking near the hall. You can also be dropped off at the entrance, which can be accessed via King’s Stables Road. A number of bus services with stops close to the venue run along Lothian Road and Princes St. The hall has wheelchair access.