Title: Program Planning: A Multi-dimensional Chess Game
Author:
Section/SPIG: School Health Education and Services
Issue Date:
In the original Star Trek series, Spock played an exotic game of three-dimensional chess. Normal chess wasn’t complex or challenging enough for him. Planning the SHES conference program for November is similar, except the number of dimensions is larger.
The board layout: APHA has allocated SHES just 11 oral sessions, one roundtable session, and four poster sessions for the 2004 Annual Meeting in Washington. We also have the option of transferring abstracts to other sections.
The challenge: Fit 163 submitted abstracts into the limited number of presentation slots, maximizing quality and interest while maintaining fairness and minimizing disappointment. About 40 percent of submitted abstracts have to be rejected.
Some of the dimensions to juggle:
Reviewers’ ratings. The most valuable aid to a program planner is the rating and comments given to each abstract by the panel of volunteer abstract reviewers. This year 42 people agreed to review 12 abstracts each and nearly all followed through on their commitment. Reviewers are a mix of former section leaders, people who were approached, people who have expressed interest, and last year’s student presenters. (If you want to help, inform next year’s lead planner, Terry Wessel, at wesslemt@jmu.edu).
Student abstracts. SHES has a long-standing commitment to accept as many abstracts as possible from current students in public health programs. Until recently we could routinely accept all that were submitted. Now we have to be more selective: this year we accepted 23 out of 27.
Interesting sessions. Once an initial determination has been made whether to accept or reject each abstract, the accepted ones are grouped into coherent sessions with catchy titles likely to grab wide interest. Sessions on obesity prevention were well attended last year, so the topic is on the agenda again. Sexuality education is another perennial favorite. This year we received several interesting abstracts about innovative survey and research methods, so these have been grouped into one session. School connectiveness, an emerging concept, is another session theme. Innovative, “hands-on” school programs make up the roundtable session. Sadly, a worthy abstract might not be accepted if the topic is a unique outlier.
Special sessions. The overall theme of this year’s APHA Annual Meeting is the Public Health and the Environment, and a group of six linked abstracts were submitted on new developments in environmental education. It was an easy decision to grant these a dedicated session. A second special session is devoted to a group of national health and education associations who want to showcase their collaborative efforts. Another session showcases new initiatives and resources from the U.S. Department of Education and CDC’s Division of Adolescent and School Health.
Submitters’ preferences. When an abstract is entered into APHA’s online planning system, the author has the opportunity to express a preference as to an oral or poster session. We try to accommodate these preferences.
Session scheduling. SHES has no say on when our allocated sessions are scheduled. Last year our sessions rarely conflicted with each other, but this year they are bunched on Monday and Wednesday with many conflicts. The sessions have been organized into rough parallel tracks, but people will be forced to choose. Sessions expected to have the widest interest are scheduled at mid-day. No one likes to present at—or attend—sessions at 8:30 a.m., or during the last slot on Wednesday afternoon, but someone has to. At least we have no evening sessions.
Terry and I have tried our best to assemble an informative, interesting program for SHES this year. APHA is planning to send out acceptance or rejection notices to authors on May 31, and the full program will be viewable online soon thereafter. SHES members will then be able to judge how well we played this game of multi-dimensional chess.