Workshop Submission Guidelines

CCC 2024 is a unique opportunity for updating and maintaining scientific knowledge through accredited education opportunities, while also providing an ideal forum for networking and research advancement. The Canadian Cardiovascular Society’s (CCS) Scientific Program Committee (SPC) is currently seeking submissions for Workshops for the CCS scientific and educational program with interactive and innovative approaches to learning.

Technical Support:

If you have any questions concerning the online submission program or have any difficulties submitting your workshop, please contact: abstracts@ccs.ca

Fee:

There is no fee for submitting a workshop for the CCS SPC scientific and educational program.

Submission Deadline:

Workshop submissions must be received electronically through the online submission system by: April 9, 12 noon (EDT). Emailed submissions will not be accepted.

The online submission system will identify your workshop as complete or incomplete. If incomplete, the system will flag the one or more tasks that require attention and completion. Incomplete submissions will not be accepted. The submitter has until the deadline to complete the workshop submission without exception.

Designing Your Workshop:

Workshop sessions will be 60-minutes in duration, including Q&A.
Affiliate Spotlight sessions will be 60-minutes in duration, including Q&A.
In the online submission system, you will be required to identify the workshop presenters, up to two chairs/co-chairs, as well as the planning committee members, which must be entered without duplications. For example, if the Chair is on the Planning Committee, select “Chair” as the only role for that particular individual. The individual submitting the workshop does not need to be identified as the Chair or as one of the Co-chairs. When developing your workshop, please ensure the content is targeted at a general cardiovascular audience, as part of the Scientific Program Committee’s (SPC) commitment to offer multidisciplinary and inclusive content. Submission of a workshop constitutes a commitment by the workshop faculty to present at CCC 2024.

Review criteria are designed to embrace and have presented multi-disciplinary practices. Planning committee members are required to embrace the “3G” principles (recruiting faculty that considers diversity in Gender, Generation and Geography) as well as Equity, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) best practices. When preparing a workshop, the Workshop Review Committee will consider the following:

Planning committee members should consist of a community-based colleague (if appropriate) and an individual early in their career (first seven years of practice). There is no limit to the number of planning committee members;
The panel of presenters should be limited to what is appropriate for the format and duration of that session: that too many presenters could make the program objectives more difficult to achieve;
Appropriate gender representation among presenters and planning committee members is required and will be monitored by the Workshop Review Committee. The Scientific Program Committee and the Workshop Review Committee aspires to a 50/50 balance. An explanation will be required if this target is not achieved;
Workshops that include occupational diversity and individuals from education partner groups including CCCN and CSCT, as well as ACQ, may be graded more favourably if appropriate. A full list of CCS partnerships is available here;
Educational needs of the target audience must be a principal consideration; and
Learning objectives are observable, measurable and should promote a change in knowledge, skills and attitudes of the learner at the end of the program.

Click here for a list of the approved workshops from last year.

Click here for a list of the types of submissions.

Interactivity and Engagement:

Describe the ways in which you plan to engage and promote interaction with your workshop participants. A minimum of 25% of the duration of the session must be devoted to interactive learning strategies and distributed throughout. Participant engagement and interactivity will be included as a question in the post-workshop evaluation.

The workshop should be designed to best present the proposed content. For example, for controversial material, a debate may be an appropriate format. For skills development, simulation or performance assessment activities may be appropriate.

Interactive learning and participant engagement must be a component of approved educational activities, whether they are face-to-face or asynchronous, using technologies such as an Audience Response System (ARS) tool.

Live event interactive strategies can include:

Q&A period
Live polling between presenters and audience using the Audience Response System (ARS), integrated in the event app
Panel discussions
Small breakout groups
Think, Pair, Share: opportunities to reflect and discuss content with colleagues
Debate.

Social Media Promotion:

The CCS SPC committee encourages workshop participants to promote their session on social media to increase reach, engagement, and participation. Nominate your workshop twitter ambassador in the submission site when you submit your workshop.

If your workshop is accepted in to the program, your twitter ambassador can participate by promoting your workshop before and during the session. Also write your own tweet; what would you want a CCS tweet to say about your workshop, don’t forget to include a hash tag, as well as the CCC hashtag #CCCongress, and tag us at @SCC_CCS.

Learning Objectives:

Learning objectives are derived from the needs assessment data collected by the Overall Conference Evaluation. They allow participants to decide whether a specific session meets their learning needs. Provide three learning objectives that are clear, measurable, and achievable.

Learning objectives must address the learning needs of your target audience and will be included in promotional material as part of the session description. Be sure to submit content exactly how it should appear in program and marketing materials.

Strong learning objectives should:

complete the sentence “At the conclusion of this session, participants will be able to”;
clearly outline the focus of the content, and the expected outcomes for all parties involved;
be linked to the identified needs;
learner‐centered; and
describe through action verbs the specific knowledge, behavior, skill, attitude or learning outcomes that participants can anticipate from attending educational events.

Example:
At the conclusion of this session, participants will be able to:

identify atypical forms of aortic stenosis (e.g. low gradient, preserved ejection fraction);

Words to AVOID as they are not easily measured and open to many interpretations:

understand
appreciate
know
believe
learn

For more information on how to effectively write objectives click here.

Conflict of Interest Disclosures:

Conflict of interest forms identifying commercial relationships must be completed online by the planning committee and all other faculty members. The person submitting can complete the disclosure on behalf of all planning committee and faculty members but must be done so in consultation with each individual listed. By disclosing any direct or indirect conflicts of interest, the submitter authorizes the Canadian Cardiovascular Society to disclose the conflict.
All disclosure information and off-label drug use for accepted workshops will be made available upon request and must also be disclosed on the second slide of the presentations. Conflicts of interest forms and slide templates are available on the CCC 2024 site, on the Presenter Resources page, once the notice of acceptances have been sent.
Please ensure that all faculty presentations are consistent in their use of either generic names or both generic and trade names during the presentation.

Grading and Selection of Workshops:

Workshop submissions will undergo a blinded review process by the Workshop Review Committee, a sub-committee appointed by the CCS Scientific Program Committee. Each workshop will be reviewed by a minimum of three reviewers and graded on the following criteria:

The workshop must demonstrate innovation in format and delivery;
The workshop must be collaborative by demonstrating the following:
- a focus on participant engagement and interactivity;
- an effort to include more than one CCS Educational Partner and/or Affiliate (if applicable/appropriate);
- the inclusion of a trainee and/or an individual early in their career (first seven years of practice); and a community-based professional on the planning committee; and
- present a multi-disciplinary approach and practices;
Panel is composed of a no more than 50% + 1 of one gender, unless otherwise justified;
Panel is composed of members of different career phases, including early career, unless otherwise explained;
Panel is composed of diversity in occupation, specialty or subspecialty, unless otherwise explained;
Panel embraces Equality, Diversity and Inclusion best practices, click here for more information;
The topic and content is timely, relevant, has high scientific merit and is balanced and objective;
The workshop is free of industry involvement and support;
The workshop has novel information – new developments in ongoing topics of interest;
The content is a hot topic that links current news or topics that typically spike media interest; and
The workshop incorporates news you can use including information that is directly relevant to the public and/or health professionals and/or multi-disciplinary teams that will change surgical or clinical practice, and prevention strategies, etc.

To view the full Workshop Scoring Criteria, please click here.

Workshop Evaluations:

If selected for presentation at the Canadian Cardiovascular Congress your workshop will be evaluated by participants using the event app and/or event platform. All workshop chairs are required to allocate five minutes at the end of their workshop to remind and allow participants the opportunity to complete the session evaluation. Following the conference, workshop chairs can request the evaluation summaries to review the success of their workshop. If you have any questions, please contact abstracts@ccs.ca.

Information for Presenters:

Please review the following documents to ensure that your presentation is complete and meets all of the workshop requirements:

All presenters must register for CCC 2024 and are responsible for their own accommodations and travel expenses at CCC 2024. Registration will be open in the summer, and available at www.cardiocongress.org.

Registration is NOT complimentary.

Notice of Status of Workshop:

All submitted workshops must adhere to the aforementioned guidelines to be considered for acceptance. Notification of acceptance or rejection of workshops will be sent by email by July. Please be sure to add abstracts@ccs.ca to your safe senders list to be sure you receive all notifications. Only the submitter will receive the notification, which should be shared with all other contributing and participating parties.

Submissions on similar topics may be restructured into a collaborative session at the discretion of the SPC.

Workshop submissions must be received electronically through the online submission system by: April 9, 12:00 noon (EDT).