Smith & Nephew Education Seminars

How AV1 became a virtual education expert in collaboration with Smith & Nephew

When the pandemic hit in March 2020, all the medical education seminars and face-to-face meetings that are essential engagement tools for medical devices company Smith & Nephew were stopped in their tracks. 

Their education events teach medical staff how to use their products, how they might be applied in problem-solving medical issues and give nurses and others professional development points to maintain their skills and accreditation. 

So really, these events simply just couldn’t stop.

“The logical step was to go virtual and have them online,” says Shivali English, Congress & Events Specialist for Smith & Nephew in Australia and New Zealand. 

But this is not quite where AV1 comes in.

“We had actually used another provider to start off with, to do our webinars and podcasts, and they just couldn’t keep up with how much we wanted done and the quality started slipping,” says Shivali.

And now… enter AV1, in the form of hardworking Producer Nigel Mintern. 

“That’s when we approached Nigel, and said, ‘Do you guys do webinars and podcasts?’” says Shivali. Smith & Nephew had worked with AV1 on several of their live conferences in the past.  

Nigel said yes, of course, and thus began an extremely productive working relationship. 

So far AV1 has produced 27 webinars, 26 podcasts, three symposiums, two virtual training courses delivered over three weeks each and one on-demand course for Smith & Nephew. The majority of content is pre-recorded, but the training courses and symposia typically also feature a live Q&A. 

In the pipeline, at this point, for the rest of 2021, are four webinars and 13 podcasts, two more online courses and a fourth symposium that’ll coincide with Wounds Australia’s Wound Awareness Week in August.

“AV1 has been very flexible in meeting our expectations and demands,” says Shivali.

“Nigel’s fantastic. We have a good working relationship – him and I have been working very closely for over a year now.”

For his part, Nigel says it was a challenge in the beginning with the sheer amount of content that needed to be produced quickly.

“Initially we had to pre-record a whole heap in a very short space of time,” he says. 

There was a point where he was recording seven sessions in one go, which meant some long days. Now, however, it’s all a well-oiled machine, for which AV1 continues to work with Smith & Nephew to make improvements.

AV1 also built the website which serves the content to over 6,000 registered users and continues to deploy email campaigns to users each week to let them know when new content is available. 

Nigel says they’ve made progressive changes to the website so that it now acts as a plentiful source of information for Smith & Nephew about their clients and how they are engaging with the virtual education offering. 

And Shivali says their digital content offering, which has become more structured and thematic over time, is set to continue for the foreseeable future. 

“We need to do that because there is a certain expectation of us doing it now and we still need to have that engagement.

“This is the norm now.”