Dear European colleagues!
Congratulations from the Ukrainian Association of Family Medicine!
The motto of our Association is "Health of Ukrainians is in the hands of a family doctor".
We made a long way of family medicine development in our country from the post-Soviet (Semashko’s) very specialized system of medical care to the new European management of primary care based on general practice. The specialty of family medicine was introduced in Ukraine in 1996. Family medicine departments in institutes and universities as well as in postgraduate training academies were opened two years after. In Ukraine at present we have more than 15 thousand family doctors, and 8 thousand are members of the Ukrainian Association of Family Medicine (UAFM). In 2010, family medicine as a scientific specialty was introduced, which makes it possible to conduct research related to the work of primary care. We have Ukrainian family doctors who have PhD degrees and some of them have also a professor’s status.
The UAFM was established in 1998 and has been a member of WONCA Europe since 1999. We celebrated the 20th anniversary of our membership, and in 2020 our conference was attended by colleagues from Europe, including President of WONCA EUROPA Professor Mehmet Ungan.
UAFM has several departments according to the directions of activities: scientific, educational, international relations, primary management, and nursing.
In accordance with the directions of WONCA it is also planned to create a few more departments of UAFM as well as: department of rural family medicine, a department of teachers of family medicine.
UAFM takes a responsibility to organize all-national and international conferences for family doctors twice a year attended by international delegates, including experts of WONCA, EURACT, EGPRN, EQUIP etc.
EURACT council meeting and Leonardo 2 course were scheduled to be organized in Kyiv in April 2020. Unfortunately, due to COVID-19, the events were postponed to spring 2021.
As all countries of the world nowadays, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Ukraine is going through a difficult period. Doctors try to support each other and their patients and trainees in order to adapt to the challenging situation around.
On the 4th-5th June Ukraine will organize an online conference with the topic "A healthy person is the key to a healthy society and the role of the family doctor". This conference will be virtually attended by our foreign colleagues from Belgium, France, Israel, Latvia, and Africa. The issues of COVID-19, the reformation of primary medical care in Ukraine, as well as a number of clinical issues faced by the family doctor in a practice are planned to be discussed during a conference.
An important issue for family physicians today is to improve the quality of work based on evidence-based medicine and the development of quality indicators on which we are working with the National Health Service.
Congratulations to our German colleagues on the opportunity to host the WONCA Europe conference in Berlin at the end of the year. We hope that such an honor can be given to Ukraine in the coming years.
We wish all our colleagues health, a lot of strength and energy, trust and support for each other.
President of UAFM
Professor Larisa Matyukha