Presenting at Medical Meetings

Lectures on scientific data, educational lectures, and the various other forms of oral presentation are the basis for every medical meeting. Physicians are not professionally trained in giving lectures. This becomes very obvious when one visits a medical meeting. Often the message of the presentation is lost because of poor preparation, slides that fail to communicate effectively, and a generally unconvincing performance by the lecturer. To give a high-quality lecture that will be remembered for its content and form, one first has to learn some basic rules about preparation, PowerPoint slides, and oral communication. This book will enable the reader to overcome all the common presentation mistakes and to start a new career as a professional lecturer and esteemed faculty member.

Jim Reekers, MD, PhD, is a well-known interventional radiologist with a more than 25 years experience in lecturing all around the globe. He is a professor of Interventional Radiology at the University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands and he is working at the Academic Medical Center in Amsterdam. He has been the president of the Cardiovascular and Interventional Society of Europe (CIRSE) and is currently the chairman of the European School for Interventional Radiology (ESIR) His main goal has always been the promotion and education of the medical specialty of Interventional Radiology. Over the years he has developed a vision on how to get the most out of a medical lecture. He noticed that many medical lectures are unstructured with unreadable PowerPoint slides presented in a non convincing style. Most doctors have no training in lecturing and there are no courses or books to teach them. 'Any business professional would be in serious problems if he tried to sell his products or ideas in the way most doctors give a lecture', Dr Reekers says. Looking at commercial presentations he realized that medical doctors could learn a lot from them. He started to develop local guidelines for presenting scientific data. This book is based on this experience and vision together with what is known in corporative business about presenting data.