For the 23nd anniversary of its annual Educational Seminars and Trade Expo, the Atlantic Canada Clinical Engineering Society (ACCES) partnered with the Canadian Medical and Biological Engineering Society (CMBES) to create the ACCES23/CMBEC41 Joint conference, which took place in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, on May 8-11th, 2018. The sheer number of vendors, which exceeded capacity of the conference room, and the overall quality of educational offerings – which included a presentation from a world-renown guest speaker within the clinical/biomedical engineering community: Binseng Wang, ScD – made this event a huge success.
Over the course of four days, delegates from Atlantic Canada had a chance to meet and network with their counterparts working in Clinical and Biomedical Engineering across Canada. A true feeling of collaboration was present throughout the event, and highlighted in the 2-hour Cross Canada Check-in session on Friday morning, where attendees got to hear and even participate in sharing best practice and innovative ideas from their own provinces and programs.
The theme for this year’s event, “Biomedical and Clinical Engineering in Canada … Lighting the Way to a Better Future” recognizes the ever-changing technical environment where Clinical and Biomedical Engineering professionals are called upon for the provision of expertise and leadership. We are required to constantly scan the horizon for emerging technologies and trends in healthcare and be ever-ready to assist healthcare providers in the application of these technologies. This conference left all attendees bet
ter equipped to meet this task.
Supported by ACCES since 2008, the annual Educational Seminars and Trade Expo is made possible in Atlantic Canada by our many loyal sponsors, vendors and presenters, by the conference planning services of Health Association Nova Scotia, and by a newly formed conference committee which is created each year. The ACCES23/CMBEC41 conference planning committee, chaired by Brent MacKinnon, has been able to bring us yet another successful installment.
With over 30 educational sessions covering three core streams, Academia & Clinical Papers, Leadership Management, and Technical/Clinical Education; as well as two keynote speakers, two half-day training courses, and a CBET (Certified Biomedical Engineering Technologist) training course, our delegates had a chance to enrich themselves with a wide variety of educational topics. It is no wonder that the only real complaint organizers received from delegates was that there was not enough time to do it all!
The variety and quantity of sessions offered, paired with the quality of the sessions themselves, made for an exceptionally enriching learning experience. The event also featured a well-attended Exhibitor Hall with an all-time record of over 50 booths from medical equipment vendors and biomedical equipment & service providers.
The days being packed with educational sessions and vendor activities, evenings were not a time for delegates to slow down: with networking opportunities, ACCES board meetings, the ACCES annual general meeting, a fundraiser that raised a record-breaking $2,366 for hospitals in PEI, not a moment of this three-day event was wasted.
All things considered, the ACCES23/CMBEC41 Joint conference was a great success, and we hope to see the healthcare technology community coming together in such great numbers again at next year’s ACCES event in Halifax, Nova Scotia!
