We asked Raj Bhopal, Edinburgh Ambassador, Professor of Public Health at the University of Edinburgh and Chairman, Executive Committee of the Congress about the success of the conference and the challenges it presented.

What persuaded you and organisers/committee to choose Edinburgh?

Edinburgh is one of the most spectacular cities in the world and could provide a memorable, low-cost (subsidised) academic and social programme. It was a very good place for a conference of this kind, because Scotland has made quite a big contribution to epidemiology and public health, which is true historically and Scotland's always been punching well above its weight.

Also the Congress partners who hosted the conference included the four academic departments leading epidemiology and public health in Scotland (in the Universities of Aberdeen, Dundee, Edinburgh and Glasgow) and NHS Health Scotland.

If you want to sell Scotland, you might as well say Edinburgh, it's just so well known - particularly in North America. People want to come to Edinburgh, they've heard about it or they've been here, and the city of Edinburgh is beautiful - if you show people slides it's immediately striking that it's a wonderful place to be.

We showed a video in Bangkok of the EICC main auditorium, and how it opens out - that was very impressive to people. And we had a piper in Bangkok to pipe us in to the AGM of the council meeting, that'd never been done before... So they could see that there were cultural issues there that were attractive.
 
Also from the council's point of view, they know that Edinburgh's easy to get to. It's relatively cheap in terms of transport, so people can get to Edinburgh from America, from Europe, from the Mediterranean. But they never would have been interested in us just for those factors - we had actually put together a very strong academic bid with a strong budget. We were able to put together a very convincing menu of what the science and research components of the congress would be.

If the conference was going to be held in Scotland, it was going to be held in Edinburgh because the Convention Bureau provided the impetus to put together a bid and the funds!

What were some of the highlights?

I think the highlights have been the enjoyment expressed by delegates - they've told us that they had a great time and learned a lot. They worked very hard - sometimes you go to international congresses and they tell you that they got a thousand delegates and you think ‘where are they?'. In our case delegates were very visible and the large, main auditorium which has a capacity of 1,200 delegates did look busy, and always full or nearly full.

Deputy First Minister of Scotland, Nicola Sturgeon also attended and gave a fantastic, informed talk. She spoke with great passion and said the Scottish Government is attacking the unhealthy nature of our population with great vigor. As an example she talked about Scotland's attempts to bring about a minimum pricing policy for alcohol, she said ‘we're going to do it - previously we were thwarted, but the politics have changed, so we're going to bring this about, and if and when we do it, we'll be the first country perhaps in the world to achieve it'. The delegates gave her a spontaneous round of applause - so that was really good.

What were the main events of the conference programme and how did you co-ordinate this?

The plenary lectures given by the great and the good from across the world were superbly executed. We really achieved a goal - the panoramic views of the subject that they'd been asked to talk about in a very short period of time, they had 30 minutes maximum, and they really delivered and took it very seriously.

I brought together my academic colleagues from across Scotland, because I recognised that if we were holding a congress of this dimension, it couldn't just be an Edinburgh event, it had to be a Scotland-wide event to give it credibility, to bring together the resources and to share the workload.

Overall, was the conference a success?

Yes. We had predicted 1,000 papers would be proposed by delegates, and we got 1,950 so that was a key signal that there was a lot of interest, that lots of people out there had noted this congress is coming up and wanted to participate.

We also put out a call for workshops with just two week's notice. We didn't think we'd get many, to be honest we were just trying to go through an open, transparent and democratic type process. We'd already arranged eight workshops and if no offers had come in we'd have been perfectly happy but at the end of that two-week period, we had 40 proposals for workshops! We felt duty bound to accept some of them and finally accepted eight of these 40 workshops, so we could see the competition was intense to come and do something in this congress.

Our budgets were based on 1,000 delegates and we achieved over 1,400.
 
How supportive was the Convention Bureau?

I provided the academic leadership and my team did the work on the academic side. The Convention Bureau handled the tourism aspect, facilities and accommodation, working with the EICC. 
 
The Convention Bureau effectively enticed me into saying yes, and secondly funding the two trips to Bangkok, because we had to go twice. It became a bit of a partnership. We put together the bid and went to Bangkok to meet with the council of the International Epidemiological Association (IEA). The vote went against us in 2005 but we secured 2011.

We were supplied with materials about Edinburgh and we had some lovely photographs. We showed a video of Edinburgh too - it's a big attraction.

How would you rate the main meeting venue?

The EICC were superb throughout. For example, when we needed to have meetings, the EICC supplied lunch and facilities so when the brainstorming committee came to think through a bid they could see the EICC and begin to experience the venue potentially for the conference. That was for the bidding process, and then when we won the bid we held a couple of our management executive meetings at the EICC, not least in order to sample the cuisine, because the management committee were saying that we're epidemiology and public health, so the food has to be really healthy, tasty and affordable. 

We had a couple of the meetings  where we were served some of the best dishes and a  variety , so we could see what the catering quality was like. When we had the council here, they came again and the EICC took them round for a tour. We've always been made to feel at home, as if the EICC was very keen on having our business and custom.

Although I was worried there wasn't going to be enough space for 1,400 people - when it's all set out there was enough space. The exhibitions were superbly arranged and the exhibitors were extremely happy because they had great exposure.
 
What was the lasting legacy?

In public health we tend to be very idealistic but this conference was not only good for medical science in Scotland, it was actually good for the Scottish economy. It's not just the people coming here to the congress, lots of people take holidays in Scotland and will go from the congress and tour Scotland for a few days.

Did you face any challenges?

The vote in 2005 went against us - there were about 120 delegates from Brazil at the meeting in Thailand, and there were three delegates from Scotland. But the council of the IEA were very keen on our Edinburgh bid, so they said ‘well we can't give you the 2008 congress, but would you like to hold the 2011 congress?'

Throughout the process, I never made decisions on my own, I always made sure that there was a large group of people behind me who were being consulted - so even to say ‘shall we bid?', I had consulted around 30 senior people throughout Scotland, including the Chief Medical Officer, and from that initial canvassing of opinion, I could see that about 25 out of 30 were enthusiastic so I could see that the weight of opinion was to go for it.

When IEA offered us 2011, I went back and canvassed people again, and on this occasion when you've already put the bid together, there was virtually unanimous opinion that we should go for 2011 and we were ready then to participate.
 
In 2004 a fundraising target of £250,000 didn't seem absurd but by 2009 it began to look impossible - banks were collapsing and with the world's economies collapsing I was incredibly worried that we wouldn't have any delegates and the congress might just fall apart. Luckily the markets stabilised a little bit and over the last year I could see things beginning to recover.

We were very worried though about the budget, costs had risen and we had told the council that we would keep our fee at £300 and £350, and that was in 2004. The council has been keeping on pressing us to reduce the fee, they keep on reminding us that some delegates have to come from very poor countries and they can't afford it. And we've kept on saying £350 is a very low fee for this kind of congress, sometimes you pay that for a one day meeting or a two day meeting, and you're getting a four-day meeting. So having set these figures in 2004, we felt morally bound to stick with them.

Any advice for organisers and in hindsight is there anything which could have been done differently?

We created budgets at the start so we could demonstrate what the conference fee would be and how much we hoped to raise to subsidise the congress. Our budget was based on approximately 1,000 people attending, so at that point we had to raise £250,000. We more or less agreed and stuck with the fees i.e. £350 for non-members and £300 for members, which for a four-day congress is incredibly low. Considering what a great venue it is as well and included tea/coffee and lunches. Delegates paid extra for the party as we had set such a low fee which was heavily subsidised.

When we started the fundraising effort, it was actually ten times harder than we envisaged. Even people who had promised us funds in 2004 and 2005, when we went to them they said sorry we can't help you. So we had to work incredibly hard to raise the money - we eventually raised something like £185,000, so we didn't quite meet our target, so it was a worrying time. Eventually you have to stop.

You spend a lot of time and energy trying to raise funds. We were very persistent; we had to go back to organisations on more than one occasion - maybe pitch the argument in a slightly different way, or maybe make an outright personal appeal to say please help us, we're in trouble financially.

The IEA Council had made it clear it was our congress - they were in support but they weren't going to help with funding. So we knew we had to break even at least.

Further information on Edinburgh International Conference Centre

http://www.epidemiology2011.com