School of Healthcare Sciences Annual Conference
Presenting your work
We are delighted that you are considering presenting your work or ideas to the Conference! If you
would like any support through this process, please do let us know using the contact details below.
The Annual Conference provides an excellent opportunity to share the full spectrum of scholarly
activities that the School of Healthcare Sciences staff, students and partners support. This includes,
but is not limited to:
 Teaching and learning
 Engagement work with stakeholders
 Learning in clinical practice
 Personal and professional development
 Research
 Quality improvement
 Service evaluation
As the School is home to people with a wide range of experience in presenting their work, the
conference will provide presenters with different opportunities to disseminate their work, from
platform presentations, to posters and discussion groups. You will be able select which method of
presenting your work you would prefer.
What sort of work are we interested in hearing about?
The conference is being organised around four themes, as follows:

Improving quality (including any aspect of patient safety, service user experience,
implementation)
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Relationships with patients and families (including communication, patient and family
education, and decision-making)

New ways of working (including new interventions, ways of working or service models)
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Improving health (including health promotion)

Building and sustaining professional partnerships (including organisational partnerships,
interdisciplinary working
Abstracts
The School is pleased to receive abstracts which describe work within any of the conference themes
from individuals or teams from our students, staff and partners in the health service and other
organisations.
Abstracts provide conference participants with a very brief summary of your presentation. They
provide the means by which participants can target people they want to speak to, to learn more
about their work.
Abstracts should be a maximum length of 250 words and should be submitted in a Word document.
They provide a summary of what you are interested in presenting, and should include:
Background: A brief outline of why you have chosen to address the topic of your presentation. Why
is it important? Why is it interesting?
Method: An outline of the work that you have completed. This might be your research methods, but
as the focus of the conference is broad, other types of methods will also be expected. This might be
some literature reviewing you have done; consultation activity; reflection on practice; partnership
work with patients, students or others; quality improvement methods, and so on.
Results: A summary of the main results, or what you found out.
Discussion and Conclusion: What are the implications of your work? What are the key take-home
messages?
You should also include the following information:
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Title
Name(s) of the author(s).
Institutional affiliation of the author(s).
Submitting your abstract
Please email your abstract to n.d.hulme@bangor.ac.uk by the deadline, which is 10 October 2014
Support for writing abstracts
For those people who are not experienced in writing abstracts, then there are some useful sources
of support which may be helpful.
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Talk to someone who is more experienced. Can they buddy-up to help you?
Talk to a member of the Conference Organising Committee – details are below
Speak with your personal tutor
Attend one of the abstract writing workshops on either our Bangor or Wrexham campuses –
look out for dates.
Some of our students and staff participated in an abstract writing workshop earlier this year. Some
guidance that this group developed which might also help is reproduced overleaf.
TOP TIPS FOR WRITING CONFERENCE ABSTRACTS
The writing process
Identify a critical writing friend to help you develop your abstract.
Start with writing out 3-5 sentences which summarise the scope of the work that you’re thinking of
presenting within an abstract. Don’t worry about making the sentences flow. Try summarising your
work with your critical friend. Ask them to reflect back what they think your work is about. Try to
identify any other ideas or content that you felt you had to tell your critical friend, and which you
hadn’t written in your initial outline.
Use strategies like elevator pitches to help you identify why your work is important. Imagine having
only a very short time to tell someone why they should be interested in your abstract. Try to limit
this to three key points. Write them down, and try them out with your critical friend to see which
points make sense.
You should now have the framework for your background section, and be clear about some of the
key words that you want to include in the title.
Write a long list of what you did, or what work you plan to do. Again try this list out with your critical
friend. Could they see a logical flow in the work that you described? What bits were essential?
Include as much detail as you can. For example, what types of patients, students or others were
involved in your work. How many interviews did you do? How many papers did you include in your
literature review?
You may have identified a wide range of findings from your work. Which ones do you think the
conference would be most interested in hearing about or reading? Again, try to limit this to three
key findings to maximise the impact of your abstract.
You’re very nearly there! The last task is to write your conclusion. Use the try-outs and reflections on
the issues of most importance in your elevator pitch to construct a final statement of what your
work shows (or hopes to show). Again, be very selective in what you include. You might want to ask
your critical friend about what surprised them about your work to give you a pointer.
Some general points
All abstracts have common elements of:
 Background: - the scope of your work and the professional, policy or practice issues that are
relevant
 Methods: - what work you did to address these issues
 Findings:- a selection of some of your most important findings
 Discussion and conclusion: - the implications of your work
Different conferences will have slightly different formats for abstracts, but if you have prepared your
work in these areas you won’t find it difficult to submit an abstract in the required format.
Try to include words or phrases from the professional or media narrative about nursing or
healthcare to add ‘bite’ to your abstract.
Use the description of conference themes to identify key words or phrases that you could use to
demonstrate the relevance of the work you’re submitting in the abstract.
Other good words to try to integrate in the title or abstract content are novel, new, significant,
creative, and important.
Writing abstracts is as much a craft as a technical process. The best way to develop your skills is to
practice!
If you would like to discuss your ideas with a member of the conference team, our contact details
are below:
Dr Chris Burton – c.burton@bangor.ac.uk
Dr Lynne Williams – lynne.williams@bangor.ac.uk