Evaluation Report: 10 Years Tsunami Phuket, “The Next Tsunami Zero Lost”
Participants of the 10 Years Tsunami Phuket, “The Next Tsunami Zero Lost” conference, which took place 10 and 11 December 2014, filled out evaluation forms that reflected their experience. The evaluation forms recorded the participants’ position, thoughts on the speakers and presentations, lessons learned, if the information could be used in practice, and any suggestions participants may have for the future.
Doctors and nurses were the two largest groups among participants. Others included trainees, researchers and IT professionals.
The evaluation forms reflected an overall excellent/good experience from participants. Participants also had the option to indicate specific speakers to evaluate, which many did. Because of this, there is feedback related to different people. If no speakers were identified, it can be assumed they were judging the conference overall. It is good to have feedback on different speakers, but in the future it may be better to have the evaluation forms more uniform so there is a bigger pool of data to analyze.
Part three of the evaluation form was general information that asked the participants’ opinion on: the appropriateness of the lecture, accessibility of the facility, and overall rating of the symposium. As in part two, responses were overwhelmingly positive.
Part four addresses the participants before and after knowledge of the topics covered, but there seems to be an error in the evaluation sheets creation. Most evaluation forms have an incomplete statement that reads, “Before the symposium,” with nothing following it. Other evaluation forms incorrectly read as, “Before the symposium, I’ve ever known about Colorectal Disease.” It appears to be a cut and paste error.
Judging by the responses, people answered as though it questioned them about their knowledge related to emergency medicine before the symposium, and if they learned anything new from attending. Most participants indicated that attending did provide useful/new information.
Part five indicated whether or not the information from the symposium could be applied to practice, and a majority of participants indicated that it could.
Participants had the option to highlight parts of the meeting that were particularly good, bad and provide any additional comments. Negative comments included scheduling issues that did not allow time for presenters to address the audience for a question and answer session. The participant indicated that 10 minutes should be left for questions and answers.
Other negative comments included: unhappiness due to some presentations not being in English, no presentations on Phuket specifically, and that speakers did not represent a large variety of specializations.
A good part of the meeting was the presentation on DMAT, which two participants specifically mentioned in the comments section, and the presentations by Mr. Adachi and Mr. Kai were also noteworthy.
Interesting comments from the survey include the suggestion of having more media present to convey the messages learned in the symposium to the general public, including the implementation of disaster preparedness plans. Also, the same person suggested that Thailand should implement DHEAT teams after implementing DMAT teams as Japan has, in order to alleviate losses during disaster situations.
Overall, the responses were positive and participants were generally happy with the symposium. Despite a majority of the audience being medical professionals, they still indicated that they learned something from the symposium, which reflects its overall usefulness as a meeting. In the future, more attention should be paid to the evaluation forms themselves to make them more uniform and without error.