A National Migraine Centre Heads Up Podcast transcript
Heads Up is the award-winning podcast series on all things headache, brought to you by the National Migraine Centre. Produced by leading headache doctors, it’s the trusted source of information and support for all those affected by migraine and headache.
You can find our episode transcript below. Want to listen to the podcast? Just head over to our Heads Up section here for hours of episodes that can help you manage migraine and control your headaches.
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[00:00:06] Welcome to the Heads Up podcast brought to you by the National Migraine Centre. The only UK Charity treating migraine and headache.
Dr Jess Briscoe [00:00:15] So welcome to our little teaser into the series 4 of the Heads Up podcast. I’m Dr Jess Briscoe and I’m joined by my lovely colleague, Dr Katy Munro.
Dr Katy Munro [00:00:27] Hello, I’m very pleased to be here again.
Dr Jess Briscoe [00:00:31] Absolutely. You may have noticed that there’s been a little bit of a gap for us, which we will explain in a minute. But we thought what we’d do is actually bring you a little taster into what to expect for series 4, because you have had to wait quite a long time for this one- this series to drop. So, as I said they do call it in the business a teaser so we thought we’d go along with that.
Dr Katy Munro [00:00:54] You’re going to tease it.
Dr Jess Briscoe [00:00:55] Yeah. We are. So, I think we have mentioned it before, but there have been quite a lot of changes in the clinic which were brought along due to the COVID pandemic situation. Obviously we weren’t able to continue seeing people face to face, which meant that we had to all start working virutally. And then we made the decision not to continue at our former premises, in Holland Park. So that has changed the way the clinic works in the way that we’ve been doing it, so that’s why it’s taken us longer. So, we are continuing to do virtual clinics and we’re also starting up- we have started a number of injection clinics as well. So hopefully we’ll be able to give you some more news on that soon.
Dr Katy Munro [00:01:41] If you haven’t already- if you sign up on our website for our newsletter or on our Facebook page or Instagram, we’ll keep you posted with any kind of upcoming changes to how we deliver the service. But at the moment, we’re going to be doing virtual consultations on telephone or on Zoom. It isn’t actually Zoom, it’s Teams, I think, but you know what I mean. And so it seems to work very well for patients because they don’t have to jump on a train or get in a car and drive for hours to come and see us. But it’s been so popular that we have got an enormous long waiting list. So what we would encourage you to do is to have a listen to our podcast and see whether that can help sort out your headaches and give you some support. Because we have had really good feedback that people have managed their headaches better on their own. So there may be a bit of a wait before you can get an appointment with one of our specialist doctors, but we’ll keep you posted.
Dr Jess Briscoe [00:02:39] We are, as I said, we’ve had a few changes to our team structure, but also it means that it’s also changed the way that our team is set up. It means that we can be a little bit more widely spread than we have been before when we were just having the clinics in London. So we are really keen to recruit new doctors. So, traditionally, we’ve had neurologists, other general doctors actually and also GP’s too. But anyone, we’ve also had people some other areas of medicine as well. Anyone who feels that their skillset would be applied, who’s interested in headaches, had any kind of background in headaches, would be great to hear from you. And as we said, you don’t have to be based in London now we’re doing virutal clinics, but if you contact the team, the information should be in the blurb below. And you can find out more about that.
Dr Katy Munro [00:03:29] Yeah, you don’t have to know all about headaches. That’s important to say. So we do offer full training and it was a bit of a challenge last year and we thought it was going to be quite difficult to train new doctors, but in fact it turned out to be really very easy to do. So there’s also lots of educational resources that we can signpost people to. So if you are interested in joining the team, send off an email to info@nationalmigrainecentre.org.uk and the admin team will forward you the job description and the details of what the job entails. So that’s exciting. And then we’ve also had big changes in our staffing in that David Bloomfield, our chief exec who’s been with us for the last few years had decided to retire and so we’d like to take the opportunity to give a big thanks to him for all the hard work that he did for the National Migraine Centre and wish him joy and happiness in his retirement. And we’re thrilled to welcome our new chief exec. Mr. Dan Tickle. So Dan has hit the ground running and we are very busy at the moment, as I mentioned earlier, and there’s lots of things that he’s running to get his teeth stuck into and start moving the National Migraine Centre forward as a charity in all sorts of directions about how we see patients, what kind of educational resources we can give, and one of the things we were hoping to do this year is to improve access to young people and children with migraine. So a big welcome to Dan and we hopefully are going to have an exciting few years ahead with him at the helm. So topics? Shall we just give a little hint about some future topics?
Dr Jess Briscoe [00:05:27] Yep. So we’ve done an episode on other types of headaches. So we talked a lot about migraine, cluster headache, lots of different types of migraine. We thought we’d neglected a whole load of headaches. So people can hopefully learn a bit about other types of headaches that we haven’t covered before.
Dr Katy Munro [00:05:43] Yes.
Dr Jess Briscoe [00:05:45] We did one on migraine in pregancy.
Dr Katy Munro [00:05:49] Yes, that should be coming soon. And I also was very lucky to speak to Dr. Shin Beh, who is a consultant neurologist, a neuro-otologist from Texas, about vestibular migraine. So we’ll be getting a bit more information about that. And there’s also episodes coming up on migraine and acupuncture and also one on chronic pain. So we’ve also got some others we’re working on, which I’m not going to divulge at the moment.
Dr Jess Briscoe [00:06:18] We won’t give away all our secrets.
Dr Katy Munro [00:06:18] No.
Dr Jess Briscoe [00:06:18] It’s just a teaser not a full spoiler.
Dr Katy Munro [00:06:23] So, keep an eye out for new episodes because we’re very busy at the moment it may be that they’re a little bit more spread out than the previous series, but if you subscribe and keep your ears peeled, then you will catch the new episodes as they come out.
Dr Jess Briscoe [00:06:42] As always, we do always at this point ask very kindly that if you have enjoyed the podcast that you like, rate and subscribe so that it goes out to other people, share it to other people on social media. And also the other thing that we’re always- it’s really important to us as a charity is if you could donate some money towards us. We are entirely dependent on donations to run, to do these podcasts, to keep seeing people in clinics and to hire our new doctors as well. As I’ve heard Katy say before, there’s no donation that’s too small and there’s certainly no donation that’s too large. So please do click the link in the bio or the blurb at the bottom, which will send you to our donations page, and we’d be really grateful for that.
Dr Katy Munro [00:07:32] Yeah. And anybody who can please leave a review on Apple Podcasts or any of the other podcast places that allow you to give reviews because it all helps other people with migraine to know about us. So the more that we can wave a flag and say, this is a podcast that might help, then the more people we’ll get to get some help hopefully.
Dr Jess Briscoe [00:07:56] We do also really enjoy getting your feedback, I have to say and we’ve also had some great recommendations for topics in the past from Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, all sorts of different sources. And so please do, if there’s any burning needs that you think might be useful or a gap in knowledge or anything you think we haven’t covered or that isn’t adequately covered elsewhere, please let us know and we’ll see if we can try and incorporate it somehow.
Dr Katy Munro [00:08:20] Okay. That’s all from us for today and I hope you enjoy series 4.
[00:08:27] You’ve been listening to the Heads Up podcast. If you want more information. Or have any comments. Email us on info@nationalmigrainecentre.org.uk. Till next time.
This transcript is based on a past episode of the Heads Up podcast and reflects information available at the time of broadcast – some facts may have changed or new treatments become available since.
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