Oxford, 6th September 2022
This year’s IDEAL Collaboration International meeting is coming back home to Oxford, where IDEAL began with the Balliol Colloquium meetings in 2007-9. We will be next door to Balliol College, in the much more attractive environs of Trinity College, where I have the good luck to be a Fellow. The brand-new Levine building has great facilities for small and medium-sized conferences in a beautiful location in the centre of Oxford. For those who can’t make it in person, the programme will be hybrid, and we are working hard to ensure that virtual attendees get to participate fully, and get as much of the content and flavour of the meeting as possible.
This year’s meeting is built around a series of seminars in which experts and active researchers relay their experiences and give their views on the potential value of IDEAL in various contexts, propose new ideas and applications, and suggest ways in which the Framework and Recommendations could be improved. The expert talks are aimed at stimulating general debate and where possible reaching a consensus view. We discuss how surgical robots should be evaluated (and IDEAL’s role) and how IDEAL can be integrated into the evaluation work of device regulation, Health Technology Assessment and coverage/commissioning decisions. We have reports on the barriers to implementing IDEAL and debate on what these are and how they could be overcome. And we have a session on new initiatives and new areas where IDEAL may be adapted to be helpful to evaluation, featuring IDEAL in training evaluation, in evaluating surgery in low-income country settings, and the outstanding work of Baptiste Vasey on early clinical studies of healthcare AI, which was rewarded with a Nature Medicine publication for the DECIDE-AI guidelines.
We are particularly delighted this year to welcome Professor Deb Stocken, who has new thoughts to offer on improving the statistical underpinning of the IDEAL Recommendations. This is something which has needed to be addressed for a long time, but until now awaited the arrival of someone with the expertise and the vision to develop it. Deb will be hosting next year’s IDEAL meeting in Leeds, so we hope her session at this year’s meeting will whet your appetites for more!
We will dedicate the final session this year to a discussion of the future of the Collaboration and hopefully develop some ideas on aims and strategy which can be taken back to the Council for further discussion. One thing we are determined to do is to make the Collaboration more genuinely collaborative and member-led, so please bring your ideas and be ready to speak about them.
We look forward to seeing you in November.
Find out more about this event
Peter McCulloch
Chair, IDEAL Collaboration
