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Are you or one of your residents or students presenting a poster for the first time at a National Meeting?  Getting a little bit anxious about presenting to thousands of your fellow pharmacists?  Take a deep breath and consider these suggestions:

Formatting your poster:

• If you need more than 2 lines for your title- you need a new and shorter title.
• Keep text to a bare minimum.
• If there is a choice, use a figure rather than a table, and a table rather than text.
• Start out with more figures and graphs than you think you will need - you can always hit the delete key.
• Insert a text box into your figures to summarize the take away message from your data. Your study objectives or your purpose statement should be your guide. The text box should contain a key point about each figure. You may need to revise figures to make sure the message is clear, and can be understood without reading any fine print.
• Try out your figures on someone who has no idea about your study and ask them what the figures mean. Revise your figures as needed.
• Don’t forget to end your poster with a concluding sentence.

Preparing for your poster presentation:

One option is to not prepare and just stand there watching people pass by. Pretty soon you start to feel like a major dork and wish you had tried a different option.

I suggest you…

Develop a one sentence opening statement about your project that you offer to everyone that stops by. Posing a question works very well. When desperate, pose the question to anyone that slows down, or makes eye contact. For example- Have you tried to assess the impact of Clinical Pharmacists? Are you satisfied with your ADR reporting system? Have you been asked to control costs, or to improve safety? What are you doing about the PPMI, or REMS? Go ahead, be creative you will think of something.

Follow your opening with 3 or 4 bullet point type statements starting with what you found, and ending with your recommendation.  From the audience perspective you are answering these 3 questions: Why should I care about your poster, what did you find, should I believe you, and what are you going to do about it? If you are lucky, people will have questions and that’s when I would point out methods, limitations, etc. It is very important to project your interest and enthusiasm about the research. Think about the audience’s point of view- if the author seems uninterested, your audience will walk away fast.

Perhaps your findings are controversial and do not fit into the conventional wisdom. Terrific- you have an important project! Don’t be surprised if colleagues stop by to challenge these findings. Your poster should already acknowledge the limitations of your project. There is no reason to argue with anyone. Given the limitations of your methods, and that your conclusion is supported by your methods than what you found is what you found. Don’t be surprised if your poster is discussed during any future residency/job interviews that you have.  It will be so much more interesting for you and for a potential employer to discuss your project instead of getting stuck on generic "why do you want to do a residency discussions".

Remind your preceptors and colleagues to do their best to drum up an audience for your poster. Don’t forget to provide legal size copies of your poster to use as handouts.

I hope to see you and your poster at ASHP MidYear. Isn't this exciting!!!

This article was published in the September 2011 issue of KeePosted, the official newsjournal of the Illinois Council of Health-System Pharmacists.