Rheumatology '09 - Conference feedback

This year, the BSR Conference returned to Glasgow’s SECC and was one of our most successful conferences yet. The conference attracted around 2200 attendees over the four days of the conference, including speakers, exhibitors and around 1800 delegates. In spite of the increased number of people attending the conference, on-site registration ran smoothly and people were able to register and head off to sessions with a minimum of queuing.
The conference featured the usual diverse mix of sessions, from the interactive Primary Care workshops to our prestigious Heberden Round, Heberden Oration and State of the Art lecture. This year we provided a Presentation Relay room, where delegates could go if a session they wanted to attend was full. We did have technical problems with this on the first morning, but for the majority of the conference it was a great facility to ensure delegates didn’t miss out on popular sessions.

25th Anniversary

This year’s conference was also a celebration of the BSR’s 25th anniversary. The BSR’s exhibition featured a timeline of rheumatology to the present day, as well as banners paying tribute to our current and past presidents. The Welcome Reception featured an address from George Nuki, first president of the BSR and our 25th anniversary social event, held at the stunning Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum was another opportunity to toast the past successes of the Society and look forward to the next 25 years.

What did people think of the conference?

This year for the first time we conducted the evaluation survey online and received our highest response yet – around 400 to date. The feedback has been very positive; 95% said they would recommend the conference to a colleague, 81% said that the conference is a key date in their professional calendar and 91% said that they learnt new things at the conference.
The content of the conference received both positive feedback and suggestions for future topics, which will be considered in full by the Heberden Committee. 80% of attendees felt that the programme had the right balance of clinical and scientific content.
Encouragingly, over a quarter of attendees were attending the conference for the first time, showing that the conference is attracting new delegates, as well as offering plenty for people who have attended in the past - 45.5% had attended five or more conferences.

Suggestions for change

We are always looking at ways to develop the conference, and many respondents had suggestions of areas that need improvement. Many of you felt that we didn’t give enough prominence to our award winners, particularly the winners of the Michael Mason and Garrod prize. We are going to address this in 2010 with a revamped plenary session which will showcase these prizes.
Quite a few delegates ask why we don’t take the conference to a wider range of cities within the UK. The answer is that we would love to! Unfortunately due to the size and the format of the conference – several large parallel sessions taking place at once, a large exhibition – there are surprising few venues within the UK that can accommodate us. Having said that, the Events team is always looking out for new venue possibilities.

Rheumatology 2010

Our conference feedback tells us that many of you welcome the idea of a three day conference, and Rheumatology 2010 will be the first year it will run in this format. It will be held at the ICC Birmingham between 21-23 April 2010 and will be preceded by a day of stand alone events on 20 April. This will include our popular primary care symposia as well as an education day ‘Rheumatology for Rheumatologists’, where you can update your knowledge in key areas of rheumatology. Full details will be available in due course on our website.

Thank you

Thank you to everyone who attended Rheumatology ’09. We particularly thank all our speakers, chairs and committee members who contributed to the programme and helped to make the conference such a success.