How to present community health projects at conferences, poster sessions, and grand rounds. Abstract writing, slide design, and presentation frameworks.
As a fellow, you have multiple venues to present your work: the annual National Aequitas Health Conference, your medical school's research day, regional and national conferences in your specialty, and grand rounds at your institution. Each has different expectations, but the core of your presentation is the same — a community health project with real outcomes.
Most conference submissions require a structured abstract. For community health projects, use this framework:
Keep the abstract under 300 words. Avoid jargon. A reviewer should understand your project in 60 seconds.
For the National Aequitas Health Conference and most medical school presentations, you'll have 8-12 minutes. Here's a structure that works:
Slide 1: Title slide. Project name, your name, chapter, year.
Slide 2: The community. Who are you serving? What does the health landscape look like? Use a map, a statistic, or a brief story — not a paragraph of text.
Slide 3: The need. What specific gap did you identify? How did you identify it?
Slides 4-5: What you built. The intervention, the partnership, the logistics. Photos if you have permission. Keep text minimal.
Slides 6-7: Results. Data, outcomes, patient feedback. Be honest about limitations.
Slide 8: Lessons learned. What would you tell the next fellow who wants to do similar work?
Slide 9: Acknowledgments. Community partners, faculty advisor, chapter leadership.
Rule: no more than 6 words per bullet, no more than 4 bullets per slide. If you're reading from your slides, you have too much text.
Posters follow the same structure as the abstract — Background, Methods, Results, Conclusions — but in visual form. Key principles:
People read posters from 3 feet away. Use 24pt font minimum for body text, 36pt+ for headers.
One figure or chart is worth more than three paragraphs. If your project has quantitative results, visualize them.
Include a QR code linking to your published article in the Aequitas Health Journal. This drives traffic to your publication and makes the poster more useful.
Print your poster at your medical school's print center — most offer student pricing. Standard size is 48" × 36".
If you're invited to present at grand rounds or a departmental meeting, adjust your framing for a physician audience that may not know Aequitas Health. Open with a 30-second context: "Aequitas Health is a national medical honor society for health equity — similar in structure to AOA or GHHS, but focused on community health projects." Then go straight into your work.
Grand rounds audiences want clinical relevance. Connect your project to the department's patient population, quality metrics, or community health obligations. "This project is relevant to our department because..."
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