Rhine cruise wrap-up: Everything’s shipshape!

Blog Author: Tara Lyon [3]

A month after our return from our spectacular cruise down the Rhine River, the results are in: attendees loved our latest BCMJ CME cruise. Participants who completed Sea Courses’ online evaluation form said overwhelmingly that the sessions met their learning objectives and were relevant to their practice.

The individual performance of CME faculty also scored highly in evaluations. Half of our faculty members had over 80% of respondents rate them as “excellent,” while the other half had over 50% “excellent” ratings.

Sea Courses hosts (that’s me and Kashmira!) scored over 70% “excellent” ratings, but we couldn’t have done it without the assistance of the top-notch staff on the Amalegro. Every day the ship’s crew was hard at work behind the scenes providing efficient meeting room set-up and wonderful refreshments, and our uber-organized multilingual cruise director Cherie gave us great support in helping us meet the needs of our attendees.

Comments from attendees included:

• The talks were interesting, the humor was appreciated, and the fact that the sessions started and stopped on time was great.
• Sessions stimulated thought, and some discussion with other participants.
• The overall standard of the talks was excellent and the range of topics was interesting. Short sessions were great.
• The sessions were short, informative, and contained many “pearls” in practice.

The feedback we received also gave us a good impression of areas we can improve for future BCMJ cruises. A common complaint was that our session room was too small to comfortably seat all attendees--unfortunately, for logistical reasons, our sessions had to be moved from the dining room to the aft lounge at the last minute, and we had to do our best with the smaller space. It would have been ideal if our cruise could have had the entire ship for the conference--as we did in the Galapagos--and we will certainly keep this in mind if we consider a river cruise in the future.

Cruise attendees, faculty, and staff all agreed on one point: the route, scenery, and ports on our cruise were amazing. Also, the river cruise ship was a great venue for enjoying a collegial atmosphere amongst attendees. The boat was small enough that everyone got to know each other and develop a real camaraderie on board--I particularly enjoyed each and every one of my dinner conversations, and I know everyone had a blast at 60s night in the lounge!

Kashmira and I really enjoyed meeting everyone and sharing the Rhine River experience with all of you. Hope to see you again next time!
--Tara Lyon

For information on other CME cruises visit www.seacourses.com [4].