The next biannual congress of the International Diabetes Federation will be held in Abu Dhabi, UAE, on 4-8 December 2017 and will feature more than 200 speakers and representations from 230 national diabetes associations. Register now.

At the last congress (in Vancouver in 2015) I was hired by the IDF to develop and provide a diabetes module of the mHealth for Healthcare Professionals course and I find it amazing that this freely shared video recording is the only content from the entire 200+ hours of conference proceedings that there is any record of because despite the IDF’s claimed ambitions (eg. to embed mHealth and make it a compulsory part of quality care for people with diabetes) has a bizarre outdated approach to sharing.

The organisers were so out of touch in 2015 that they were starting conference sessions by showing a slide that reminded delegates not to take or share images/videos.

They were even publicly telling off delegates who they discovered sharing content with the event’s #WDC2015 hashtag on Twitter. Worse still some of these delegates weren’t tough media hacks or experienced clinicians but Patients who they generously given up their week and been sponsored to fly around the world to attend the congress!

I find it quite amazing that in 2017 a congress of such high profile is still not live streamed and that the media guidelines are still so incredibly outdated:

The only sense I can make of it is that the federation feels it might lose control of the conversations but it’s really bizarre because the #IDF2017 hashtag is really prominently posted on the homepage etc:

The conference website is also really poorly designed and the “IDF Congress Profile” tool that’s supposed to help you plan your congress experience is next to useless.

To make it a bit easier I’ve compiled the following mHealth Guide that you may find useful if you’re going (or looking to conduct research and follow along via the limited ‘unauthorised’ social media sharing). If you’ve seen anything I’ve missed please let us know in the comments thread and I’ll update the listing.

Tuesday 5th December 2017