Healthcare professionals want participant-driven events too

healthcare professionals want participant-driven events: a photograph of an attendee sleeping during a boring meeting. Photo attribution: Flickr user markhillary

Healthcare professionals want participant-driven events. 75% of healthcare professionals want to have input into the content of meetings they attend. Yet 36% have never been asked to provide input into any agenda or program. These disconcerting statistics are two of the research findings in a February 2016 report The Future of Meetings [free download] commissioned by Ashfield Meetings and Events.

Healthcare meetings ranked just behind professional journals (92%) as the second most popular (87%) regular channel for learning. But the survey of 237 healthcare professionals from 11 countries across the Americas, Asia, and Europe found:

“nearly 40 per cent of those interviewed have not had a positive delegate experience at the meetings they have attended.

So remember, healthcare professionals want participant-driven events!

I expect these findings, from a relatively well-funded meeting sector that can certainly support high-quality meeting design, apply to most conferences. And yet, the majority of conferences still rely on a small group to preplan a fixed session program.

Meeting owners and planners: It’s time to supply what your attendees want!

A hat tip to MeetingsNet‘s Sue Pelletier for making me aware of the report via her article “Research Puts Some Science Behind Scientific Meetings“.

Photo attribution: Flickr user markhillary

2 thoughts on “Healthcare professionals want participant-driven events too

  1. What did you think of their conclusions, and their formula for involving HCPs throughout the whole “learning journey”?

    1. The survey results are interesting and useful, and they are what I extracted from the document.

      I’m not impressed by the “formula”. I don’t see how it follows from the research findings. Though I don’t have a problem with the individual components listed, they seem incoherent and incomplete, and the central one “Are you working with the right network of experts who can provide the elements you will need with ease?” is a marketing pitch.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *