VAMHN'S ECR BURSARY WINNER Elaine Craig REFLECTS ON HER EXPERIENCE ATTENDING THE Trauma summit in dublin.

Have a read below to see what our ECR bursary winner Elaine Craig did with her award money. To find out how you can apply to our ECR Bursary Scheme click here.

I was delighted to be awarded the VAMHN Early Career Researcher (ECR) bursary to attend the Trauma Summit in Dublin. The Summit was set to bring an array of international experts in the field of trauma recovery to discuss how to bring hope, healing and renewed life for the next generation. However, lockdown measures have thrust in-person scientific conferences onto virtual platforms (including mine). So, I was intrigued to experience the pros and cons of virtual conferencing on ECRs careers.
 
I am currently pre-PhD and my aims for attending this conference was to use the Summit to overcome the NIHR’s reported reasons for not being a successful PhD fellowship candidate. Those include a lack of ownership and feeling like the proposal came from your supervisor(s), gaps in supervisory teams, and insufficient dissemination plans. Therefore, I hoped to (1) learn what the current theories, techniques and practices were to treat/heal trauma (2) identify research gaps/assumptions specific to trauma caused by abused (3) network with international clinical and research experts to fill gaps in my supervisory team (4) note the real world challenges in theory practice gaps to develop an action-based dissemination strategy.
 
The learning was just as superb as an in-person conference with no technical glitches despite 1.5 thousand attendees logging in from around the world. The emerging themes included: how lockdown measures have impacted client’s symptoms and therapy practices, how talking therapies alone are no longer enough but physical techniques encompassing the body is imperative for wholistic healing and recovery and exploring a social justice approach to trauma treatment when it is caused by intergenerational, systemic abuse. Therefore, my aims to learn and identify were more than achieve online.
 
The online summit was adapted to include nine live keynote presentations and six pre-recorded workshops. During the keynotes you could anonymously pose questions to the speaker that would be voted by the other attendees. The questions with the highest votes were addressed. Whilst this was a practical solution the questions ECRs posted were never asked. Nearly every question that was answered was practitioner led. This was a disadvantage of the conference as the theory practise gaps unless explicitly note in the keynote was quite hit and miss.
 
The biggest ‘con’ of online conferencing is the networking element. A researcher’s calendar is already often overcrowded and these conferences are the prime opportunity to establish new as well as nurture old long-term, mutually beneficial relationships that can pay you back in dividends throughout the course of your career (particularly at the beginning stages). This is where the power of Twitter comes in. With no online way of networking option, I took to the Summit’s Twitter handle and followed the keynote and workshop leaders that interested me and made sure to tweet them about their talks. Likewise, I followed the conference tweets and followed/retweeted/ the attendees whose comments sparked my interest. Whilst not quite same as in-person networking I still managed to strike up potential research collaborations for the future.    
 
My reflections of virtual conferencing in a lockdown world would be to be proactive in your attendance. Write down beforehand what you’d like to get out of the conference. Keep a journal of your personal and professional research reflections to look over after the conference and get on Twitter and use that as a platform to facilitate networking.