19th September 2019: Medical conferences world wide are generally funded by pharmaceutical and medical devices industry. We have to accept the fact that these fundings are the single most important source to ensure medical conferences are viable. In Asia particularly, registration fees from delegates alone will never be sufficient to fund a high quality medical conference. Clear understanding has to be made with the industry that there will never be any sort of obligation from the end users of the technology or pharmaceutical provider.
The continuous medical education is the main drive for healthcare providers to attend conferences and in today’s world, information is freely available. Then how will a good conference benefit the attendees? The conferences should be a place to exchange views and discuss as we know medical science is an evolving subject. We should avoid having ‘key opinion leaders’ on stage with uni-directional lecturers. Everyone in a conference should have their say and open discussion will be educating for both speaker/moderator, panelist and the delegates.
ENT summit is now 10 years old and next year would be the 11th event and today we met the industry partners to brief them the concept and program at the venue hotel.