Abstract guidelines and submission process

Introduction

Specific sessions at the conference will be dedicated to allow researchers and policy makers to present and discuss past and current work in the field of pharmaceutical policies. Contributions to these sessions can be submitted to the organisers of the conference in the form of abstracts.

The sessions will take place on the second day, Friday, 30 September 2011 from 11.30 to 13.00 hours. There will be four parallel sessions, offering different types of presentations (see below).

Please note: For the presentation of pharmaceutical systems in the session on Friday, 30 September 2011 from 9.40 to 11.00 hours, there is a call for posters displaying the pharmaceutical system in countries according to a pre-fined template. This call for posters is independent from this call for abstract.

Submission procedure and deadlines

Abstracts can be submitted electronically through the conference website via online form. The receipt of your abstract will be confirmed by an automatically generated e-mail response indicating the automatically assigned number of reference of your abstract. Please indicate the number of reference in all your communications relating to the abstract.

Abstracts will be reviewed on a rolling basis starting February 28th, 2011.
Final deadline for receipt of abstracts is April 29th, 2011 June 19th, 2011 (extended deadline!).
An early submission of abstracts is recommended and appreciated.
You will be informed by the end of June / mid of July 2011 if your abstract was accepted and in which form (oral speech, brief oral presentation, poster only; for specifications see below).

Different types of submissions and presentations

When you submit your abstract, please indicate if you would like to present your submission as an oral presentation.

If your abstract is accepted, there are three way of presenting it:

  1. Oral presentation
    Authors of highest rated submissions per strand will be invited to present their work in a speech of about 20 minutes. A poster may be prepared on a voluntary basis, however slides (powerpoint presentation) are mandatory.
    For each of the three strands, three abstracts will be selected for an oral presentation.
    The presenters will be exempted from the conference fee for the whole conference.
  2. Brief oral presentations of a poster
    Authors of high rated submissions will be invited to present their work in a brief oral presentation standing next to their poster (no slides). The presentation should last max. 5 minutes and will be followed by a brief question & answer session (max. 5 minutes).
    A special session will be devoted to these brief presentations and discussions. Eight submissions will be selected.
    The presenters will be granted the reduced conference fee for these.
  3. Posters
    Additionally, further accepted submissions will be granted the possibility to be displayed as a poster (no presentation). There are no reductions or exemptions of the conference fee.

All presentations and posters of the accepted abstracts will be published in the conference documentation, provided receipt of the electronic version by 1 September 2011.

Evaluation procedure

Submitted abstracts are evaluated by the members of the Scientific Programme Committee (link to SPC) or further experts nominated by the Committee.

Topics which will be highly ranked in order to be directly presented at the conference will include

  1. an impact assessment/evaluation of
    1. a pharmaceutical pricing and/or reimbursement policy or intervention for change or
    2. a tool/intervention/measure for the rational use of medicines or
  2. an evaluation of (successful) examples of interface management initiatives between the in- and out-patient sectors in relation to medicines management
  3. best practice models of pharmaceutical policies in relation to pricing and reimbursement, the rational use of medicines and interface management.

Size and language:

The abstract text must not exceed 3,000 characters (including spaces). The 3,000 characters do not include title, authors, lessons learned and success factors, keywords and funding sources.

Submission should relate to completed or ongoing research (with first results) and must be in English. If English is not your mother tongue, a language check before submitting your abstract is recommended.