Message from NOTA Chair

I hope you are safe and and healthy at this challenging time.

I am extremely pleased to report that the NOTA Wales and Northwest Branch joint training event at Liverpool John Moores University in December and a similar re-launch event in Leeds at the end of February for the Yorkshire and Humberside branch were both very well attended and received great feedback. The first regional Republic of Ireland conference was also a great success.

As these events show, NOTA’s aim and strength is to enable you to be a part of a network of practitioners to share both knowledge and support, which feels even more important at this unprecedented time. We are therefore endeavouring to maintain that network and support for you during the coming months; however, we have had to make some changes and will need to adapt and find different ways to deliver some of our activities, which I will outline below.

The Finance Group and Board are meeting more frequently via telephone and online conferencing to manage and mitigate risks and to ensure maintain our activities and network. NOTA’s financial position is currently in line with expectations for this time of year, but there are financial risks due to Covid-19 and we have taken some steps to mitigate and reduce costs where possible, without detracting from our core activities. Membership fees are a vital source of income for NOTA and we are entering a period of membership renewals. We appreciate that this is a difficult time, but renewing your membership fees, if you are able, will help to ensure the future of NOTA considerably.

Due to Government guidance and the inability to meet face-to-face, we have

• Postponed the NOTA Scotland conference
• Postponed Anglian Branch training events
• Postponed the research grants

In addition, we are not planning any ‘face-to-face’ activities until at least September 2020 and are keeping this and the Annual Conference in Leeds in September under review.

I encourage branches and committee to hold meetings via teleconference/online facilities during this period and to communicate with each other using online/social media resources. The Board and branches are considering facilities/opportunities for online training and ‘events’. Please share with us your new methods of communication and successful online activities, so that we can share these more widely.

As many of you over the coming months will not have access to the location where NOTA news has been delivered to date, and in order to reduce costs, the Board took the decision to change the format of NOTA News to an online/web version.  NOTA news articles will be published more regularly online and we will contact you by email to let you know when new material is available. If you do not, or will not, have regular access to the email that we currently hold for you, please contact notaoffice@NOTA.co.uk with another email address, so that we can maintain contact.

There will be no change to the Journal of Sexual Aggression, which will be delivered as usual. The next issue, edited by Nadine McKillop and myself is a special issue on sexual violence and abuse in organisations, which will should be with you by the end of March.

NOTA has been working for some time on developing an individual treatment programme, which will be outlined in more detail in one of our forthcoming NOTA news articles. I am very pleased to report that the programme manual is close to publication. Considerable thanks are due to the development team, David Briggs, Roger Kennington and Stephanie Hill, whose persistence and enthusiasm have progressed the project to this stage. Dates had been agreed for the first training events to launch the programme; however, these have been postponed due to Covid-19 restrictions. 

We now have a LinkedIn page (https://www.linkedin.com/in/nota-uk-ireland-a37a2b1a4) and you can continue to read our blogs http://www.notaprevention.co.uk/2020/03/20/sessions-held-on-the-phone-some-ideas-and-helpful-pointers-for-clinicians/

You can also communicate with us and follow us on twitter @NOTAevents. 

Please do let us know if you have any ideas for activities or requests in respect of blogs or NOTA news articles.

We understand that this is a difficult time and we are continuing our activities as far as we can and increasing the frequency of communication to provide much needed support and information. 

Keep well.

Sarah Brown
NOTA Chair
Sarah18.Brown@uwe.ac.uk