Like clockwork

For those charged with organising medical meetings for a pharmaceutical company, the Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry (ABPI) has provided "tips for running successful meetings", as part of its long-term leadership strategy support.

As part of the 'interactive toolkit for joint working between the NHS and pharma', titled Moving Beyond Sponsorship, the ABPI has published seven top tips to make your medical meeting run as smoothly as clockwork.

1. Have clear objectives for each meeting (be realistic and focus the discussion)
2. Prepare thoroughly (make sure the chairman is well briefed and include contingency plans)
3. Focus the meeting on action planning and not updates (ensure people know the current situation before they get to the meeting)
4. Send out documents that are to be approved in advance (avoid giving 'approval required' documents to people at the table; this results in long, uninformed discussions)
5. Send out agendas, pre-reading and documents to be approved in good time (circulate these one week before the meeting)
6. Work on the principle of 'no surprises' (key speakers should be fully prepared; don't surprise people with new information, especially where a decision needs to be made on the contents)
7. Report promptly (aim to get minutes approved by co-chairs and published within two weeks).

The downloadable pack (visit www.abpi.org.uk) also includes a 62-point Meeting Logistics Check List covering: slides, AV equipment, signage, badges, participant materials, speaker materials, venue, travel and money, laptop and other general items for organisation.

Global meetings platform
The ABPI made its guidance available online at the start of March, a couple of weeks before the Fourth Annual Pharmaceutical Meeting Planners Forum took place in Baltimore in the US. As well as highlighting some important trends in the current and planned use of meetings by pharma, it was revealed that while 89 per cent of attendees said their companies want to 'globalise strategic meeting management programmes', just one in three believe their organisation is 'ready' to start this process.

The challenges in rolling out global meeting programmes were said to include:
• dealing with country-specific regulations
• foreign language barriers
• getting regional buy-in
• implementing global technology platforms.

According to the results of a survey conducted by Cutting Edge Information, in collaboration with Medical Meetings magazine and The Center for Business Intelligence, the average pharma 'meeting department' expects to spend $6.6m (£3.3m) holding 1,496 meetings in 2008.

Some 59 per cent of meeting planning departments come under the 'marketing' umbrella, while 29 per cent are overseen by sales and 23 per cent fall under the authority of procurement; some programmes report concurrently to several departments.