Preliminary report from GAME Regional Meeting in Mumbai, India in October 2014
The first GAME regional India meeting was held in Mumbai, India on 18 Oct 2014. All major Indian CME stakeholders met under one roof to address the various challenges in the Indian CME ecosystem. This meeting essentially aimed to provide a way forward for a more formalized CME structure, which currently has discrepancies all around the Indian sub-continent.
The meeting was attended by CME stakeholders, including prominent names in academia and the pharmaceutical industry. GAME board members gave an intense picture of the CME/CPD environment worldwide, revalidation systems implemented, and the need not only to educate the health care providers, but also to aim for better patient outcomes.
The program director Mr. Vaibhav Srivastava (Insignia Communications, Mumbai) opened the meeting to describe India as being in a very primitive stage of CME set-up and gave insights into a set of uniform standards in the CME ecosystem for efficient clinical outcomes. Dr Vedprakash Mishra, the Chairman Academic Council, Medical Council of India emphasized that continuous medical education needs to be initiated right from the medical institutions. This mandate necessitates timely and periodic update of the healthcare education.
The meeting was attended by 105 participants from Medical Council, Medical Societies executives, KOLs’, pharma and Medical Communication Companies of India. There were 7 sessions and 2 panel discussions that took place during the meeting.
Mr. Vaibhav Srivastava, along with the GAME directors (Maureen Doyle-Scharff, President; Lisa Sullivan, President Elect; and Eugene Pozniak, Program Director, European Forum) contributed valuable insights regarding aligning CME in the Indian clinical setup to global standards. They have joined hands to work together in the long run to address this mammoth task. GAME intends to assist in creating awareness amongst the Indian CME stakeholders to create a cohesive CME environment that enables learning and clinical practice. This will definitely help in shaping the CME ecosystem in India.
