Choosing conference sessions
A personal conference programme matches subjects, session formats and levels to an attendee’s interests and experience, while allowing for overlapping sessions, preparation and limited places.
Planning and booking
Track guides and a schedule at a glance can help an attendee assemble a personal programme across workshops, open sessions, roundtables and posters. Popular workshops can fill quickly, so early registration improves the chance of securing first choices. The conference website and organiser emails should be checked for updates as the event approaches.
Parallel workshops require choices: attending one means missing other sessions running at the same time. At EMWA’s two-day Florence conference in 2014, one attendee could choose at most four of the 28 sessions offered. The small-workshop format supported close discussion and interaction, but limited how much of the programme one person could cover. A conference programme may therefore need to be spread across return visits; two experienced attendees suggested at least two or three EMWA conferences to cover clashing interests.
Preparation requirements should be checked before arrival: one attendee who overlooked pre-workshop assignments had to complete them in the hotel, although even that brief preparation helped them follow the sessions.
Recordings can change the choices available: AMWA’s virtual 2021 conference recorded all sessions so that registrants could attend as many as they wanted.
Discussion and practical formats
Breakfast roundtables provide small-group discussions led by members with expertise in a chosen subject. Places are limited by the format; in AMWA’s 2013 programme, ten roundtables were repeated because attendees at previous events had missed preferred discussions.
Other formats in that programme offered different depths and kinds of participation: Intensive Seminars lasted two hours and 45 minutes; Round Robin Table Talk allowed one or two of four topics within 90 minutes; and problem-solving discussions invited an attendee’s pressing question for a veteran communicator and small group to consider. Hands-on demonstrations asked attendees to bring a laptop or tablet.
In 2019, EMWA’s Show It, Share It, Rise and Shine format offered a 30-minute morning session at small tables for help with particular IT, social-media and productivity tools. Earlier tables had covered social media, invoicing, research, editing, backup and readability tools, with leaders sharing practical tips. One attendee found a backup table useful for learning why and how to back up files and for discussing password protection; another discovered visibility tools later used in daily work. Small tables offered opportunities to ask about a specific difficulty and to meet people, with conversations sometimes continuing afterwards.
Poster sessions offer a snapshot of thinking and research relevant to medical writing. Session hosts can also affect the opportunity: AMWA’s 2012 open-session programme included FDA speakers on drug-safety communication and promotion, the National Library of Medicine on information resources, and the Drug Information Association on future scenarios in medical-product development.
Experience level and subject depth
EMWA’s 2019 conferences addressed writers across career stages, with workshops, practical tool sessions, expert seminars and symposia serving different needs. Introductory-level teaching can also suit experienced writers who are unfamiliar with a particular subject: a foundation workshop on writing guidelines welcomed beginners and experienced writers who had not used those guidelines, without a prerequisite.
Expert seminars served experienced medical writers, department heads and industry leaders, with two or three speakers, a panel discussion and questions from attendees. Expertise in a single topic could be enough to make a seminar relevant; broad expertise across medical writing was not necessary. Examples included pharmacovigilance, orphan drugs, data protection, clinical trial registries and public databases, Cochrane reviews and medical journalism.
A symposium brought multiple experts’ and stakeholders’ perspectives to a single subject over one day, addressing regulatory and medical-communications writers together. Past subjects included medical devices and technologies, emerging opportunities for writers, transparency and disclosure, and risk management and risk-benefit evaluation.
An experienced freelance regulatory writer valued new workshops for learning unfamiliar subjects and familiar workshops for comparing her experience with others. Learning unfamiliar subjects increased her confidence in taking assignments in those areas, while pre- and post-workshop assignments and personalised feedback improved the learning experience. She expected a mix of workshops, symposia and expert seminars to remain useful after years of conference attendance.