An important aim of the EFNS is to establish European standards of diagnosis, treatment and care within the various subfields of neurology. Europe with its very heterogeneous neurology needs to establish not only guidelines for the diagnosis and the treatment of neurological disorders, but also for the organisation of certain aspects of neurology.
The consensus guidelines of the EFNS are produced by so-called task forces. A task force is a group of people with a chairman and a written mandate, which usually runs for one to two years. The task force and the chairman are appointed by the President of the EFNS following advice from various sources, primarily from the chairman of the Scientific Committee. Presently a number of task forces are at work (see Task Forces), and soon virtually every issue of the European Journal of Neurology will contain an EFNS guideline paper.
Although most suggestions for task forces originate from the scientist panels and committees, every neurologist in Europe is in fact entitled to suggest the formation of a task force and to propose himself or herself as chairperson of such a task force.The EFNS is keen to recruit all good ideas, and only the validity of the suggestion and the importance of the topic decide whether a proposal for a task force is likely to gain acceptance by the chairman of the Scientific Committee, the President and the chairman of the relevant Scientist Panels, who would be consulted.
All readers with good ideas are therefore encouraged to come forth with them, preferably by sending a tentative written mandate and a tentative list of members of the task force to the chairman of the Scientific Committee at the EFNS office (see Chairpersons). The chairpersons and members of a Task Forces shall be appointed by the President or the Chairperson of the Scientific Committee taking into consideration qualifications as well as geographical spread. A Task Force normally consists of only five to seven persons in order to facilitate the working process and the writing of the final guideline paper.
The EFNS has a mailing list and all guideline papers go to national societies, national ministries of health, World Health Organisation, European Union and a number of other destinations. Corporate support is recruited to buy large numbers of reprints of the guideline papers and permission is given to sponsoring companies to distribute the guideline papers from their commercial channels, provided there is no advertising attached.
A further step would be the translation of these guideline papers into the various languages of Europe. Such translations for local use are strongly encouraged and there will be no royalty payments and no conditions as long as translations are accepted for their quality by the President of a national neurological society or his delegate. The dissemination of translated versions may be done in any way that the neurological society finds suitable, including printing the translated version in neurological journals in non-English languages, provided proper reference is made to the original version in the European Journal of Neurology.