THANKS to the Internet and other telecommunications gadgets, the world has become a village where rapid dissemination of information is a vogue. Before this era, periodicals, conferences and symposia were the means of sharing and spreading knowledge.
Owing to the global economic recession, there has been a remarkable increase in the trend of online journals, teleconferences but these could not supersede or replace the traditional conferences and symposia.
The purpose of these conventional academic events is to provide a platform where researchers from various institutes, cities and countries share their experiences with each other and come across recent developments on the technological front.
Arranging funds to hold a scientific meeting is a major challenge for organisers. Pharmaceutical industries and medical equipment vendors are major contributors while internal funds and registration charges paid by participants also contribute substantially.
If we look around academic institutions like Radiological Society of North America , we would appreciate the discipline and management skill of organisers with a ‘spend to learn’ theme.
To comply with this theme, organisers focus primarily on academic activities like plenary sessions, free papers, poster and technology exhibition and spend funds for meticulous arrangement of such sessions.
To exploit available funds judiciously, they do provide concise and detailed scientific programme and a text-rich abstract book which contains only abstracts and nothing else to ensure cost-effectiveness.
To make the meeting meaningful, they also allocate continuing medical education (CME) credit hours to participants for attending scientific sessions which is mandatory as a part of their annual appraisal at their institutes.
In Pakistan, various institutes and professional societies hold national and international conferences on a regular basis.
Most of these events are three to-five days’ long and the source of funding is again commercial organisations that have interests in that particular area.
However, most of these conferences have themes which do not match the scientific programme.
The stress is on social and recreational activities rather than on the scientific content.
Most organisers do not provide CME credit hours to participants. The lack of accreditation with credible agencies such as American Academy of Continuing Medical Education (AACME) is an issue. The organisers justify non-academic expenses of the conference for attracting participants. This might have been true in the past but we have examples both from Pakistan and abroad that demonstrate that this is no longer valid.
We believe that while arranging a conference, the organiser must stress on the curricular content rather than on the extra-curricular activities.
This may cut the cost of the event and enable the saving to be redirected to other educational activities or for sponsoring trainees to attend scientific meeting outside their own towns and cities.
Someone should take the lead to replace the existing culture of ‘spend for fun’ with ‘spend to learn’.
Many conferences in Pakistan have always been blessed with strong scientific content. This trend shows no sign of abating.
We hope that in these difficult economic times, we are able to set the trend of controlling expenditures.
Dr MASEEHUZ ZAMAN, Dr ZAFAR SAJJAD & Dr NOSHEEN FATIMA Karachi