A Pilot Study in the Use of the Delphi Method to Document Conference Proceedings: Comparison of the Rate of Consensus Among Attending and Nonattending Participants.

Objective: While many medical practitioners value the interactive nature of in-person conferences, results of these interactions are often poorly documented. The objective of this study was to pilot the Delphi method for developing consensus following a national conference and to compare the results between experts who did and did not attend.

Methods: A 3-round Delphi included experts attending the 2023 Society of Disaster Medicine and Health Preparedness Annual Meeting and experts who were members of the society but did not attend. Conference speakers provided statements related to their presentations. Experts rated the statements on a 1-7 scale for agreement using STAT59 software (STAT59 Services Ltd, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada). Consensus was defined as a standard deviation of ≤ 1.0.

Results: Seventy-five statements were rated by 27 experts who attended and 10 who did not: 2634 ratings in total. There was no difference in the number of statements reaching consensus in the attending group (26/75) versus that of the nonattending group (27/75) ( = 0.89). However, which statements reached consensus differed between the groups.

Conclusion: The Delphi method is a viable method to document consensus from a conference. Advantages include the ability to involve large groups of experts, statistical measurement of the degree of consensus, and prioritization of the results.