BACCN Conference 2020 – Virtual

Date: September 2020
Venue: Online virtual platform

About

The BACCN Conference takes place annual and generally attracts between 400/500 critical care nurses from across the UK and beyond. However this year, following the outbreak of Covid the conference ran virtually for the first time. This was a huge change for the association and their members and the client was keen to ensure we didn’t lose any of the networking aspects that make this event so popular as well as still having access to the latest updates in Critical Care Nursing, at a time when this was more important than ever.

Echo’s Involvement

This was a particularly poignant event for us. It marked the first large scale virtual conference following Covid but more importantly it was an event for frontline nurses who were tirelessly fighting Covid and working so hard to keep us all safe.

We met with a number of virtual platform providers to scope out the best one for a conference of this scale and complexity. We wanted to run multiple parallel streams as well as a packed virtual exhibition where all the suppliers could display their products.

The virtual conference was hosted at Woodhaven Space in Woking. There were 11 Board members, 4 presenters, 1 support volunteer, 6 AV team and 1 conference organiser present onsite. All other presenters and delegates attended virtually. The programme consisted of 6 plenary and 4 parallel breakout sessions across two days. On Sunday 13th September, conference opened with the virtual Welcome Reception via Zoom. The main programme consisted of 9 workshops, 3 live streamed simulation labs, 32 concurrent presentations, 26 posters and 12 pre-recorded poster presentations. The virtual conference also included a resource hub where additional pre-recorded presentations were added that could not be included in the main programme. In the evenings, the delegates were invited to join a virtual Welcome Reception and virtual Gala Dinner via Zoom

The virtual exhibition area included a unique page for each exhibitor, where they could have a video presentation, company profile, product details, links to their own site and staff contact information. The exhibition area received 2424 hits during the conference.

Conference in numbers:
• 464 delegates logged into watch the conference online
• 2151 messages sent during the conference
• 16 exhibitors