Thoughts from the plane
On the flight back to Minneapolis I had quite a bit of time to think about the summit and the value it provided me as a student and a future public health practitioner. As you probably guessed, we did not get a “free” ride down to the summit. We all worked various aspects of the summit. The jobs that I had involved working at the registration table (helped check is some really neat/important people), assisting presenters at the breakout seasons and running microphones to attendees with questions during the general seasons. This allowed me to see an aspect of the summit that I would not have seen without working parts of it.
We worked hand in hand with the fabulous crew from Metro Connections (the people that “ran” the conference). While this only provided a glimpse at the magnitude of work/time that went into the conference planning and production, it was very informative. It was very interesting to observe all the work that happens behind the scenes to make a conference or event go smoothly. It was also interesting to watch how a well-defined communication system worked. I have never personal seen how a well-defined communications system works in person, until now.
I thought there were tons of parallels between how the conference went and how things should be planned/produced on the public health side, aside from the fact the conference had huge public health implications. I plan to attend many more conferences and hope to be able to help plan and execute more in the future, but on a more practical side I hopefully will be playing an active part in mitigating infectious disease threats in my job. I would also imagine that meetings, work groups, forums, etc will be part of that job and I hope I remember the little things that I saw at the conference that made it run so smoothly, as they could all be adapted to whatever I do in the future. Things like being courteous, being prompt, knowing your role in the event, knowing who/where to go to get your question answered, being firm yet kind and respect are things most of us would think are commonplace but they are not. Its was interesting to see how the simple things I just listed (there are many more) made the conference function so much. Sure, the staff at Metro Connections is paid to be like that, but there is a reason why they do it. It makes their customers (the summit attendees) fell appreciated, respected and cared for. I was thinking if we (future public health practitioners) were more like that, we could probably get more done. In a sense, a lot of the partners/clients/business/public are customers of agency we work for. Public health in my opinion fits into many functional categories (health care, public works, public service, etc) and from my limited experience the “service” aspect of our work is sometimes forgotten, even though I think its one of the main reasons we are in the field (i.e. provide benefit to humanity).
Another point that became clear to me at the summit is that people want quick fixes to problems and that solutions are very rarely quick fixes. Towards the end of the summit, a poll was taken on what percent of companies have pandemic planning budgets only 25% did. Of that 25%, the funding was/is a one time deal for 55% of the companies. How can we expect to plan for something so complicated as pandemic influenza (or other public health issues) with one time funding. These are ongoing and complex issues and will not be fixed by devoting resources for a short amount of time to them. Patience and financial resource normally do not go hand in hand, but are required for pandemic influenza planning (and a plethora of things).