[Development and opportunities from de scientific committee of 25 SECA congress held in Barcelona, 2007].

OBJECTIVE: To perform a self-assessment of the Scientific Committee of the 25th Conference of the Spanish Society for Quality in Healthcare held in Barcelona on October 2007 in order to identify improvement areas for future Conferences.

DESIGN: Applying PDCA methodology to the tasks undertaken by the Scientific Committee (SC) of the Conference. Plan: A description of the preparation of the conference based on the abstract management of the Scientific Committee. Do: description of the implementation. Check: evaluation of activities. A: improvement proposals for the coming conferences.

RESULTS: The SC (22 people) worked in the abstracts management, book publishing and development of the scientific aspects of the Conference. Abstracts evaluation was conducted by 11 pairs of blind evaluators who analysed 348 oral communications and 457 posters, and 10.09% were rejected. Oral communications were performed in a total of 36 oral presentations sessions and 24 poster sessions. The book was published with the abstracts, addresses and the Conference opening and closing sessions. Awards: communications graded over 7.5 applied for an award and were reassessed by the SC. The on-line conference was also well received.

CONCLUSIONS: The satisfaction with the Conference regarding the scientific activities was good; however, several areas of improvement were identified.