The Regional Meeting in numbers Evaluation processes: • Pre- and post- knowledge evaluation • Logistics evaluation
1. PRE- AND POST- KNOWLEDGE EVALUATION Background: For the first time in IFMSA we have decided to try to measure the impact we are making to our members in terms of knowledge gained during the Regional Meetings. The process itself was discussed during TOM1, and Officials agreed that they will make sure to instruct their Regional Teams to provide the questions for the Regional Meetings. Every session had its own set of questions, made by the Regional Assistants (with input from other relevant Officials). The questions were based on the agenda of specific morning session. The questions for pre and post evaluation were the same, with the addition of a couple of questions regarding logistics in the post-evaluation questionnaire. Data collection: The form for pre-evaluation was sent 3 weeks before the meeting, with the deadline of 2 weeks to fill it out. The post-evaluation was sent 1 week after the end of the meeting, also with a 2-week deadline for completion. We received in total 93 responses for the pre-evaluation and 73 responses for the post-evaluation. One of the questions in the post-evaluation was regarding the percentage of attendance to the sessions, which was in order to make sure the consistency of their attendance and remove the participants with less than 70% attendance from the calculations. In the end, we had 55 participants who filled out both pre- and post-evaluation and satisfied all the criteria. The number based on the sessions is the following: • Presidents: 10; SCOME: 11; SCOPE&SCORE: 8; SCOPH: 11; SCORA: 6 and SCORP: 9 Data analysis: The method to analyse the data use was t test for dependent samples, since we cross-checked the responses in the pre- and post-evaluation to compare the difference. We used p<0.05, as it is usually used in research in order to prevent the coincidental results. According to it, most of the sessions have not scored in the span from 0.01 to 0.05, which means that there wasn’t a statistically significant difference in knowledge before and after the regional meeting. Exchanges sessions had p of 0.004, which means that there has been a statistically significant difference in pre and post knowledge evaluation Conclusion: This data analysis shows that there hasn’t been statistically significant difference in knowledge of the participants of EMR Regional Meeting 2018 in almost all the sessions. Nevertheless, while discussing the process itself in the Team of Officials, we noticed that there were some mistakes from the side of the coordination, which might have affected the result, including the lack of input from the Standing Committee Directors regarding the questions in pre and post evaluation. We will ensure that this mistake is not repeated again, but we still felt the need to publish the results.