WONCA Europe Newsletter October 2020
Dear WONCA Europe members, chairmans and presidents of our member organisations, networks and special interest groups, dear family doctors all around WONCA Europe region.
The COVID pandemic is hitting Europe again in a large wave. For this reason, we have been pushed to continue running virtual conferences, meetings and CME courses. Please see the call from the organisers of the next WE conference in Berlin December 2020 as well as an invitation to join the RCJP conference and other webinars.
Yours,
On behalf of WONCA Europe Executive Board
Sonia Tsukagoshi, VdGM, Member at large
Shlomo Vinker, President Elect of WONCA Europe
WONCA Europe Newsletter Editors
Infodemic, Health Literacy, WaterDear Members, Dear Colleagues There is an "infodemic" associated with the COVID-19 pandemic, meaning in short for "information epidemic", a phenomenon that portrays the rapid spread and amplification of vast amounts of valid and invalid information on the internet or through other communication technologies. The term has not been used much in the scientific literature before 2020. Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, both the production and consumption of information have increased rapidly and significantly. The WHO stressed that infodemic is a serious threat to public health, public action, social cohesion, and the political landscape as a whole. On the individual level, the infodemic creates confusion among recipients of information, specifically about the identification of reliable information. In the current pandemic, this constitutes a global scientific challenge. Since the current infodemic is a health-related infodemic, information literacy must be focused on health—this is known as health literacy. Health literacy (HL) is one of the most important degrees to which an individual can obtain, communicate, process, and understand basic health information and services to make appropriate health decisions. Now some include personal health literacy as well as organizational health literacy. Personal health literacy is the degree to which individuals can find, understand, and use information and services to inform health-related decisions and actions for themselves and others... |
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From the organizing committee of The European Conference of Family Doctors (organised by DEGAM, WONCA member)
Dear colleagues,
Since the COVID-19 pandemic is going on with traveling restrictions and rules for social distancing we are not able to run a face to face conference in Berlin. This is sad but your safety is our highest priority. In order to maintain our work as family doctors as well as researchers and teachers we think that we can offer an excellent solution:
We have switched to a totally virtual conference with a changed time frame. Many presentations will have real time recording with possibility of immediate discussion. There will be five parallel slots from Wednesday December 16th 14:45 CET to Saturday, December 19th 14:15 with workshops only in the morning time on Thursday and Friday and all other formats in the afternoons or on Saturday morning. All other accepted presentations will be presented in our virtual library. Participants in the conference will be able to view these as well as all presentations recorded in real time until the end of January at times of their free choice. So you have the chance to see much more presentations compared to recent years and thus you can collect a lot of CME credit points. We encourage you to come into direct contact with presenters if you have questions or proposals, especially for collaboration. This also includes the possibility to privately organize virtual meetings or workshops outside the conference platform with your own technical possibilities.
Although this is a very uncommon date we think that this is a good opportunity to reflect on the experiences of this year and to celebrate all the heroes working in our offices of General Practice/Family Medicine/Primary Health Care.
With our best regards and hoping to meet all of you during our virtual conference,
Erika Baum and Christoph Heintze on behalf of the Host Organizing Committee
ICHOM: New Standard set of outcomes for patients with COVID-19
International Consortium for Health Outcomes Measurement (ICHOM) have recently developed a Standard Set of outcomes for patients with COVID-19. The Standard Set is a minimum core set of standards, comprised of Patient and Clinician - Reported Outcome Measures recommended to be collected across primary, secondary and tertiary healthcare settings. This recommendation has been designed to track the recovery of patients suffering from COVID-19 over a three-month period following their admission. You may visit their website for more information.
Please send materials, such as interesting stories and reflections, to SecretariatEurope@wonca.net for our upcoming editions. We ask you to send the newsletter to all your colleagues and to share it on your website / Facebook / Twitter homepage.