The 95th EGPRN meeting was held live in Antwerp, Belgium from 20 to 23 October 2022. The topic of the meeting "Research on integrated community care: Focus on GP, patients and population" was linked to implementation science research questions that focus on research on real-world health promoting interventions.
214 participants from 28 countries of which 112 participated for the first time attended the meeting in Antwerp. In the meeting they had the opportunity to participate in sessions in different formats including workshops, theme and freestanding papers, one slide five minute and poster presentations. In a special “research cafe” session participants had an opportunity to discuss their research ideas or possible challenges with experienced researchers in that field.
Keynote speech of Dr. Heather L. Rogers had a title “Models, theories, and frameworks for complex interventions: From concepts to application in primary care”. In line with the meeting theme, her talk provided an overview of available implementation science research designs and evaluation approaches emphasizing the relevance of separating complex interventions from strategies and highlighting the importance of exploring contextual factors that influence the real-world effectiveness of complex interventions.
Keynote speech of Prof. Hilde Bastiaens on “General practice, primary healthcare and the community: linking the dots” sketched recent evolutions and prospects of primary health care using examples from Belgian health care and linked this to the needs in future primary care research.
Several collaborative study groups that operate under EGPRN had meetings during the conference. Some of them met for the first time, some had met for years. In these study group meetings members had an opportunity to discuss their research plans and results and possibly recruit new members to extend their reach to new countries and primary care settings.
The conference featured four pre-congress workshops. “Workshop on developing Participatory Action Research with 9 participants”, “How to start a research project on interprofessional collaboration? with 5 participants”, “Population oriented research: how to overcome difficulties? with 6 participants” and “Writing for Publication – Meet the Editors for Tips and Tricks with 10 participants”!
163 abstract submissions for the scientific programme were received and only half of them could be accepted. The accepted submissions had high scientific quality.
The theme and freestanding paper sessions were presented in the typical EGPRN format in which plenty of space is left for discussion. Poster sessions were organized in original interactive EGPRN format in which an external person presents the poster and the author only comments it and answers the questions. As usual, constructive feedback was offered to the presenters in friendly atmosphere in all sessions.
Davide Fornaciari from Modena, Italy presented the poster that was awarded as the best poster of the congress. The title of the poster was ”COVID-19 pneumonia in the outpatient setting in Italy: a population-based observational study” and it described the clinical features of outpatients in Italian general practice with SARS-CoV-2 related pneumonia and the management strategies of these patients by Italian general practitioners in the province of Modena during the first waves of Covid-19.
EGPRN is recognized within the WONCA community as an organization with focus on research supporting early career doctors to start their academic development. In EGPRN, a culture of inclusiveness, sharing and collaboration is cherished, and lots of effort is put towards breaking barriers and providing great opportunities and experiences to new EGPRN members which helps them become a part of the research community and build capacity to formulate their research ideas and develop their potential.
Tuomas Koskela,
On behalf of the EGPRN PR committee
Radost Asenova
Vanja Lazić
Ana Luisa Neves
Ayse Caylan
