Dr. Thomas Frese, WE president elect, accepted the kind invitation of Dr. Olga Mourtzouni, a Family Medicine (FM) 4th year trainee on behalf of Dr. Georgios Charalambous, education coordinator in charge of the FD residency program of the Ippokrateio- General Hospital of Athens in Greece.
The webinar was held on October 1st 2024. Dr Frese took an online journey through WONCA Europe, providing a brief introduction to WONCA Europe, its networks, special interest groups and working parties, highlighting its core activities, which included a variety of lectures, informative webinars, engaging conferences, and their regularly published newsletters.
This year, because of the success of the previous academic year, Dr. Georgios Charalambous asked Dr. Olga Mourtzouni to expand their lessons all across the residents of Greece. They are regularly carried out through Skype, so even remote teachers assist their learning. Dr Mourtzouni told us “we usually meet every second Tuesday, in a friendly environment, where they can ask everything without feeling judged, in the library of our hospital. Because a lot of us might be in a health center far from the library, we also have a Skype call, open for everyone who cannot join us in person. Sometimes, even the speaker might be online. There are 20 lessons in total and 26 speakers, lasting from September 2024 to June 2025”
And she added “The residency of family medicine in Greece is a 5-year training program since 2019. We have a flexible program that proposes clinics to participate in, under some educational cycles (internal medicine, surgery, laboratories, health of mother and child and psychiatry). 2 years are spent in health centers, close to the hospitals they work in. The full 5-years program is spent in the public sector. Their official title is general/family doctors. They work full time in the morning in each clinic that they choose to participate in, and they have approximately seven 24-hour shifts per month”.
Dr Mourtzouni explained further that when they start the FM residency, they should choose a reference hospital. Hospitals with a good reputation have a waiting list, if the number of the applicants exceed the training positions offered. Every hospital has an educational supervisor, who makes sure FM trainees get through every important clinic, and also takes care of our needs.
She further stated “our educational goals are according to the national guidelines, to the logbook we must fill out during our residency, and to the everyday difficulties we face during our encounters with the patients. They are 100% adjusted to the needs of a family doctor”.