Annual Conference of the GMA, Hamburg, Germany, 2014

these topics was the focus of the annual conference of the GMA, held fromSeptember 25-27, 2014, in Hamburg, Germany. Almost 700 participants met in the “Campus Lehre”, themain teaching facility of the University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf, to learn and discuss in 118 lectures, 21 workshops, 18 GMA committee meetings, and with 200 posters what is new in scientific teaching. Beside the interesting lectures and poster presentations, the excellent keynote speakers provided the audience with food for thought: Jonathan Silverman fromCambridge talked about teaching in clinical communication, Geoff Norman fromMcMaster distinguished between effective and less effective means to improve medical education at universities. Hans-Jochen Heinze, chairman of the Medicine Committee of the German Council of Science and Humanities, committedly presented the council’s current recommendations for the advancement of medical education in Germany. Olaf von demKnesebeck (UKE) and Victor Oubaid of the German Aerospace Center completed the programme with thoughts on how to educate socially competent medical doctors and on the possibility of transferring knowledge gained in flight security and pilot selection to medical education and student admission tests. Fortunately, the GMA annual conferences have been growing continuously over the past years, and during the meeting in Hamburg, the 1,000 society member was received! It proved to be a major logistic challenge to arrange all contributions evaluated by the more than 40 reviewers reasonably between Thursday afternoon and Saturday lunchtime. The generous spaciousness of the site of the meeting (see Figure 2) allowed the temporal separation of the various types of contributions such as poster tours and short lectures, though. Thus, we were able to ensure the participants’ full attention for all formats. This was only possible by placing the committee meetings and workshops outside of the actual congress time. In case that the interest in the GMA and our annual conferences continues to grow, a prolongation of the congress time might be worth considering.