EMWA conference, day 4

Well, the EMWA conference is all over now, and I am safely back in London, having cunningly dodged the ash cloud by a rather small margin on both my outward and return journeys.

The final day of the conference began with a plenary lecture about the importance of compliance with promotional codes, such as that by the ABPI, when writing materials that could be used for promotional purposes.  One of the great challenges in this area is that codes are not harmonised across countries, so material that might be perfectly compliant in the UK might fall foul of the code in Germany, for example, or vice versa. Definitely an area with many pitfalls for the unwary.

After that, I gave my workshop on statistical analysis of binary data. The workshop went well, and I had an excellent set of delegates who asked many very intelligent questions. It was particularly satisfying that they seemed to grasp the basics very quickly, leaving time for tackling some of the more advanced topics in more depth. We even got into the mathematical details of why logistic regression produces its estimates of effects in the form of odds ratios, which is quite sophisticated stuff. I suspect I single-handedly doubled the number of medical writers on the entire planet who understand the maths behind that in one morning.

The conference finished at lunchtime on Saturday, so after my workshop, there was nothing more to do except have lunch, relax over a couple of beers, and come home.

All in all, it was a splendid week, in which I learnt much and had a great time catching up with all my wonderful colleagues in the medical writing world. I'm already thoroughly looking forward to the next EMWA conference, in Nice in November.