I am suffering from conference fatigue – 2,500 miles in one year is too much!

My management team and I find that while the conference is one of the traditional learning opportunities that complement the training course it can be an unrealistic option for quite a few because of family commitments.

Acquiring knowledge is vital to personal and organisational development. Yet staff are often in a constant struggle to keep up to date with guidance, circulars, practice, legislation and policy and frontline qualified staff may have a continuing professional development (CPD) duty.

My organisation carried out a cost-benefit analysis looking at the combined costs of attendance, transport, possible overnight stay and staff time. This led to serious questions being asked about conferences’ value.

While some conferences are news-breakers, or launch new products, tools and protocols, only a few have high learning content. The analysis also considered which conferences are relevant to the goals of the organisation, which provide good practice tools or processes for the service and which lead to outcomes agreed with service users.

All staff within my team are offered a personal learning style audit. Conducting such an audit with staff as part of their induction plan allows better targeting of learning resources. This has led to a set of alternative suggestions:

• A CPD agreed practice of using two hours a week as personal learning time to enable reading, internet surfing, good practice and policy reading.
• Fostering information exchange such as team reading lists, service libraries with videos, audiotapes, e-mailing material or the use of interactive websites.
• Timetabling consultant briefings; some consultancies provide summaries of key issues, legislative changes or updates on policy or good practice activity.
• Conference TV or webcasts are beginning to offer technological solutions to learning need. Apart from networking benefits, the principal product of conferences today is, realistically, the ubiquitous handouts from PowerPoint presentations; we expect conference attendees to talk them through with their colleagues.
• The PowerPoint PC programme allows audio so creating a commentary or real-time recording of virtual presentations is possible.
• A most valuable aspect of good conferences is the buzz and exchange in workshops, seminars, discussion groups, and question and answer sessions with experts.
• The 21st century will see rapid learning and teaching process changes. If social care prepares itself to be at the forefront of these developments and grasps the opportunities, the advantages may be immeasurable.

Meic Phillips is assistant director of EPIC Trust, a care and support provider in London.