Department & care
Preparing a staff meeting talk
Start from the bank of talks already given, pick a topic never covered, and produce a sourced update in a few slides.
The problem
Every week, someone has to present. Talks already given get redone, without anyone knowing what was covered last year, and references are rarely checked.
Step-by-step method
- Keep a bank of talks indexed by topic and year (a simple table is enough).
- Ask for the topics never covered: they are the best candidates.
- Set the scope: audience (residents, nursing and allied health team, senior physicians), duration, key message, and the mode of the talk: historical, follow-up, review, reasoned opinion, clinical case or programme. Aim for about fifteen slides; beyond 40, it is no longer a staff meeting.
- Targeted literature review on PubMed: recent guidelines (learned societies) and landmark trials, with DOI and PMID.
- Slide-by-slide outline with the source of each slide, approved before building. A review or a reasoned opinion always ends with a “what this changes for us” slide.
- Build it in the department’s template, with references in the slide footer and the summary in the speaker notes. Before delivery, the figures are counted in the file actually written.
- Schedule the staff meetings: a calendar of the year’s slots, unfilled slots flagged early, speakers approached at D-30. A staff meeting date is only “in the calendar” once the event created has been checked.
- Staff meetings with an industry speaker: identified as such, with a declaration of conflicts of interest and an independent counterpoint.
See also: Organising the department’s staff meetings for scheduling the semester.
Deliverable
A sourced deck of about fifteen slides, added to the bank of talks.
Safeguards
No invented references: every citation is checked in PubMed. No publisher figure reproduced without permission: graphs are rebuilt from the published numbers.
Starter prompt
Here is the list of staff meeting talks from the last two years. Propose 5 topics never covered and useful for residents. For the one I choose, run a PubMed search (guidelines and trials since 2021) and draft a 10-slide outline with the source of each slide.