Crossing borders while in lockdown: reflections from the European Federation of Psychiatric Trainees virtual forum 2020
- PDF / 301,254 Bytes
- 2 Pages / 595.276 x 790.866 pts Page_size
- 9 Downloads / 166 Views
LETTER TO THE EDITOR
Crossing borders while in lockdown: reflections from the European Federation of Psychiatric Trainees virtual forum 2020 Asilay Seker1 · Peter Deschamps2 Received: 13 August 2020 / Accepted: 15 August 2020 © Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2020
The European Federation of Psychiatric Trainees (EFPT) has been organizing annual Forums for the past two decades. These Forums have served to get psychiatric trainees from all around Europe to share their training experiences and different perspectives on current and future practices in psychiatric care for children and adults and new ideas for future collaborations. The Forum is one of the Federation’s most important assets to pursue its goals: bringing trainees together by combining scientific presentations and workshops provided by international experts with the EFPT General Assembly and providing the platform for the various working groups to meet and discuss their plans for the next year. Many trainees have enjoyed the clinical visits, each other’s company, and the opportunity for networking during social events in the past years. The Forums have always been a much-anticipated time of the year for the participants and 2020 was no different to begin with. However, when the pandemic erupted, the EFPT was left to make the difficult decision on the fate of its most important event: postpone, cancel, or digitalize the 2020 Forum. Remember, this was Spring of 2020, way before online conferences became the ‘new normal’. Despite a complete lack of experience in the matter, considering its symbolic and functional importance, the EFPT Board of Directors decided to proceed with an online EFPT Forum. The content and much of the logistics of this event were arranged by the small group of trainees (seven members) that is the EFPT Board. This is important as it concretely demonstrates how relatively big scale international events can be organized successfully despite lack of funding or manpower. Quickly we decided to compensate the lack of face to face contact for participants by fully waiving the registration * Asilay Seker [email protected] 1
Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, European Federation of Psychiatric Trainees, Brussels, Belgium
UEMS-CAP, Brussels, Belgium
2
fees, which allowed us to attract a larger group of trainees. The technical infrastructure was another challenge to be dealt with as we needed a system to tackle the target audience of at least 200. We sorted this problem relatively cheaply by upgrading the capacity of the Zoom account the EFPT already had and by buying multiple other temporary and smaller scale Zoom accounts for the parallel sessions planned. The announcement of the new online format was made shortly following the decision and sent out to National Psychiatric Trainee Organizations and trainees. The regular process of registering delegates/observers from member countries was followed. Moreover, we could increase the quota for each member country, as we did not have to worry about limited accomm
Data Loading...
