This year’s British Pharmaceutical Conference in Birmingham seems to
have been a success, judged by most criteria. There were record numbers of speakers,
sessions and participants; the Conference enjoyed its traditional Indian summer
and no one, to our knowledge, fell into the canals.
A large part of its success must be attributed to the location of the Conference
at the International Convention Centre. This proved to be an almost ideal venue
— centrally located for transport, accommodation and the city centre, with
excellent facilities inside. Following on from last year’s Conference at
a similar convention centre in Cardiff, this clearly points the way ahead for
the next few years. Large, self-contained convention centres are in. Picturesque
but widely scattered university campuses are out. Indeed, this is what will
happen next year in Glasgow, when the Conference is to be held at the Scottish
Exhibition and Conference Centre.
The programme itself offered an abundance of riches, both for scientists and
pharmacists in practice, but possibly over too many sessions. This year the
conference was heavily streamed, with almost separate programmes for community,
hospital, industrial and academic pharmacists. There were few “cross-over”
events where the profession could join together as a whole and some of those,
such as the debate on self-regulation and revalidation which we report this
week (p452-453), were held late
on in the proceedings when only the “hard core” remained. Other events,
such as Lord Hunt’s much trailed keynote speech, which we reported last
week, were poorly attended by the pharmaceutical scientists. Either they were
too busy with their own sessions or they felt that it did not affect them. No
man is an island and changes at the front-line of community and hospital practice
will feed back through the profession into industry and academia.
From The Journal’s point of view, the huge programme posed a number of
logistical problems at the planning stage, but our traditional, extensive coverage
of the Conference will continue over the next few weeks.
When planning the programme for next year, the Society needs to decide what
it wants to achieve from the Conference: a joining of the clans or a series
of parallel mini-conferences. The networking and social side of the Conference
should not be neglected either in an attempt to cram a quart into a pint pot.
Overall, we judged the Conference to be a success and we hope that those who
attended did so too. The dates for Glasgow (September 23-26, 2001) are already
in our diary.