Summary of the 2nd COMPASS Annual Scientific Meeting (ASM)

Edinburgh: June 17th 2008

The meeting was held at the Royal Society of Edinburgh and was well attended and received very positive feedback from delegates. The meeting, in common with last year's ASM in Leeds, was designed to showcase supportive and palliative care research - particularly research which has been either conducted or influenced by the COMPASS Collaborative. It also provided an opportunity for COMPASS researchers, their wider collaborators and other researchers in this field to come together and reflect on progress over the last two years.

The meeting consisted of two plenary lectures from invited speakers with brief invited oral presentations from members of the collaborative, poster sessions and workshops.

The day included several notable highlights; Kurt Kroenke reminded us of the many research designs available to researchers in our field. His lecture included a discussion of stepped interventions, 'voltage drop' in the implementation of interventions, and the many possibilities associated with quasi-experimental designs (including nested trials within large cohort studies). The morning session comprised presentations on the effects of education on pain control, a major national survey on GP uptake of NICE guidance on supportive and palliative care in primary care and analysis of the supportive care needs of patients beyond the end of treatment.

The workshop on primary care included an overview of the methodological challenges of primary care based research; this included issues of recruitment, privacy and confidentiality, cluster sampling and the relatively low priority of research in the rather complex primary care environment. The enormous potential and opportunity of primary care based research in terms of access to populations and the conduct of pragmatic trials with widely applicable outcomes was emphasised in the workshop and there was significant enthusiasm for developing further proposals in this field.

Similarly the IT workshop provided an overview of the use of health technology in a range of clinical and research activities. It moved on to a detailed discussion of how these technologies might be tested and which research designs might be most appropriate. Both workshops had a strong focus on user issues and user involvement.

There was plenty of opportunity over an extended lunch break to examine the excellent poster presentations and discuss findings with their authors. The afternoon session comprised three presentations looking at:-

• Strategies to support improvements in patient centred care.
• The experiences of a user in a research project
• An interesting analysis of the MRC complex intervention framework and factors that have shaped it since its inception.

The day concluded with a thought provoking key note address from Paul Deippe who challenged some of the fundamental notions of evidence based health care and the placebo effect. It provided an interesting and thoughtful analysis of the many vested interests in research and provided examples around management of pain and depression which are of direct relevance to researchers in the field of supportive and palliative care.

The COMPASS Board retains significant enthusiasm for this event; it provides us with an important opportunity to look carefully at COMPASS-related activity outputs and make an assessment of the potential influence the Collaborative has exerted on activity in this field. It was particularly heartening to see that many delegates with only a loose association with the Collaboration choose to come to this event. The feedback we have had on the two ASM's suggests that it is the scientific rigour and interesting methodological discussions which attract delegates.

Professor David Weller,
Chair of the ASM Organising Committee
June 2008