AMWA, caricatured

AMWA is meeting this year in a beach town, if not on the beach itself. Lending a bit of the flavor of the beach boardwalk, caricature artists went to work with willing AMWA members at Wednesday night's opening reception. The reception was sponsored by RPS Inc.

Calendar of Events

Here is a Google calendar of events at this year's AMWA conference. If you click on the event, you will see further details and the room locations. Note that this list does not include the 100 workshops! The breakfast roundtables and coffee klatches also are not listed individually.

If you use Google calendar on your smartphone, please feel free to use the whole calendar or simply choose the events that you would like to add. The calendar will remain posted in a sidebar on the blog, so if you are viewing the blog on a computer, you will be seeing double. (On a smartphone, in the mobile version of the site, the sidebar does not display.)

AMWA and Ethics

If you look through the AMWA annual conference program, you may notice one word appearing again and again.

Ethics.

It’s there on the very first page, where AMWA President Melanie Fridl Ross mentions the role of medical communicators in upholding the highest ethical principles

It’s there in the title of the keynote speech: Re-creation: Ethics and the Biotechnological Restructuring of Life, which is to be delivered by Paul Root Wolpe, PhD, a professor of bioethics at Emory University and director of Emory’s Center for Ethics.

There are the open sessions, “Clinical Trial Ethics: Placebos and Other Issues,” and “Publication Ethics: Moving Beyond Authorship.”

There are the workshops:

• Preparing CME Materials: Concepts, Strategies, and Ethical Issues
• Ethics of Communicating Regulated Drug Development Activities
• Ethics for Regulatory and Research Communicators
• Fundamentals of Ethics and Practical Application
• Ethics for Science and Medicine Communicators
• Ethical Standards in Medical Publication

A self-study course “Essential Ethics for Medical Communicators” is also being launched at this conference.

I had an opportunity recently to speak with Cindy Hamilton, a past president of AMWA, who teaches some of the ethics workshops and has been a driving force in AMWA’s increased emphasis on ethics.

Listen to the Audio Interview With Cindy Hamilton.

AMWA Jacksonville Conference About to Begin

Well, that was fast. It seems like we just wrapped up last year's AMWA conference blog, and now it is time to gear up for the Jacksonville meeting, which gets under way late Wednesday.

A few things to think about before you head to Florida, or in my case, a different part of Florida:

• Lori Alexander, editor of the AMWA Journal, has a nice post over at her blog mentioning some of the great benefits such as museum discounts that she and the other local arrangements coordinators have made for conference attendees. You can also read about the Florida Chapter's drive to collect donations for Hubbard House, a Jacksonville shelter for victims of domestic violence. 
• The clock is ticking down on making arrangements for the discounted rate ($16) for the airport shuttle. Reservations must be made 48 hours before arrival to get the discounted rate.
• Read "Maximize Your Conference Experience" on the AMWA Web site, so that you can, you know, maximize your conference experience.
• The AMWA Conference blog is always looking for more contributors. If you know how to write, you know how to blog. If you are interested in contributing, please get in touch with me. I edit all posts and take care of getting them up on the blog. In addition to text, I would also be happy to consider photographs, audio, and video contributions. The more voices, the better the blog. E-mail me at VictoriaJWhite@gmail.com. 
• Follow official AMWA tweets at: http://twitter.com/AmMedWriters. If you are tweeting about the conference, please use the hashtag #amwa11 so it will be easy for people to find tweets about the conference.

Participate in AMWA's 71st Annual Conference

A message from the American Medical Writers Association (AMWA) headquarters:

We need your help to continue offering excellent choices for conference attendees. Please consider volunteering to serve as a workshop leader or to colead an AMWA workshop with an established workshop leader at AMWA’s 2011 Annual Conference in Jacksonville.

AMWA’s workshops are critical to the well-known and respected AMWA certificate program. Workshop leaders enjoy a great deal of satisfaction that comes from sharing their professional knowledge and skills with their colleagues through AMWA’s education program. Information about becoming a workshop leader can be found on the Web site on the Information for Workshop Leaders page.

The deadline to volunteer to be a workshop leader or co-leader is February 15. Other opportunities are also available if you wish to volunteer to participate in the program for the 2011 conference. Separate requests for volunteers have been sent out, and links are provided below.

Deadline to submit a short session short session proposal is January 13.
Deadline for poster abstracts is March 18.
Deadline for Breakfast Roundtable topic proposals is March 31.
Deadline for Coffee and Dessert Klatch proposals is March 31.