Participant Response
At the University of California San Francisco, head and neck dissection courses that are run jointly with neighboring institutions were interrupted because of the pandemic. But with careful planning, they were able to organize a live, but smaller, course in January, said Patrick Ha, MD, UCSF’s chief of head and neck surgical oncology.
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June 2021
It was exciting just to see each other’s faces again. And the fact that we were learning at the same time was outstanding. —Patrick Ha, MD
Eighteen residents and 12 faculty members and fellows participated. Partitions were used to split a room in two in order to limit exposure. All participants were vaccinated and were screened per usual recommendations, and no eating was allowed on site. All of the lectures were prepared ahead of time and viewed in advance of the course, which focused mainly on ablation and skull base procedures the first day, and reconstruction on the second. “People stayed until 4 or 5 p.m. each day dissecting just because it was a lot of fun to be able to reveal this anatomy for the junior residents—it’s great to have a first hands-on experience,” Dr. Ha said.
Because it was the first time everyone had gotten together as a group, Dr. Ha said it was “exciting just to see each other’s faces again. And the fact that we were learning at the same time was outstanding.”
Hisham Mehanna, MD, PhD, director of the Institute of Head and Neck Studies and Education at the University of Birmingham in the U.K., described the transition of the British Academic Conference of Otolaryngology (BACO) International meeting from live to virtual. He said that early program planning allowed organizers to focus on the technical transition once the pandemic hit.
The carbon footprint of an in-person meeting is significant. —Ellie Maghami, MD
In the end, meeting organizers put together 180 sessions with more than 300 talks, all pre-recorded, along with almost 600 online posters. Clear instructions were provided to the speakers on how to record their talks. Fees for attendees were also reduced. Attendance at the virtual event was about 1,400, a 30% increase from previous conferences, Dr. Mehanna said. About 45% of the participants said they had never attended the BACO meeting before, and 20% of the participants were international, up from the usual 10%. “We reached a lot more people who had not or could not attend previously,” he said.
In retrospect, said Dr. Mehanna, the decision to go virtual should have been made sooner, and poster presentations were too static. He hopes to add brief video recordings to accompany each one in the future. He also said there were fewer networking opportunities in the virtual platform, “and that’s what people missed the most.”
Ellie Maghami, MD, chief of head and neck surgery at City of Hope National Medical Center in Duarte, Calif., said it’s important to note the huge difference in the effects on the environment of a live meeting compared to a virtual one. She noted that, largely because so many flights are unnecessary, she had read that a virtual meeting had a carbon footprint that’s just 2% of that of a live meeting. “The carbon footprint of an in-person meeting is significant,” she said.
The consensus among the panelists was that many meetings will move to a hybrid format, with live offerings but with an option for virtual attendance. None of them, however, seemed to want live meetings to vanish forever.
“One thing that I think all of us value about attending live meetings,” Dr. Hutcheson said, “is not just the camaraderie and what we learn, but it’s also the pause that it gives us to think and connect to our specialty and medical environment.”