2nd EURACT Medical Education Conference

EURACT and KU Leuven were very pleased to organise the 2nd edition of the

EURACT Medical Education Conference 2018!

The conference was held in the beautiful city of Leuven, Belgium on September 21 - 22, 2018 and had the theme "Family Medicine Education in the real world: from theory into practice". The conference provided an opportunity for practicing family medicine teachers and researchers to meet and exchange research findings and new ideas in order to continue the development of Family Medicine in Europe.

This conference sought to emphasize an important stage in the development of the discipline of Family Medicine which is to ensure it has a secure academic base. We were particularly looking for more justification and clarification research in education to provide a strong evidence base that will underpin the enthusiastic educational efforts of so many teachers in Europe. The department of Family Medicine in Leuven was happy to host this conference on the occasion of its 50th anniversary.

We welcomed 3 different submission types:

-          Oral presentation

-          Poster presentation

-          Workshop

This conference offered an exciting programme including distinguished international keynote speakers, oral, poster and workshop presenters discussing innovative and broad scientific topics related to family medicine education!

Keynote speakers:

-          Professor Roger Damoiseaux, the Netherlands - “Teaching and learning Evidence Based Medicine in General Practice"

-          Dr Meiling Denny, Chief Examiner, Royal College of General Practitioners, UK - "Generic Competencies: Translating words into actions"

-          Professor Yonah Yaphe, School of Health Sciences of the University of Minho in Portugal - Janko Kersnik Memorial Lecture "Teaching Family Medicine in the real world: the view from three continents"

The keynote talks may be seen here: https://www.kuleuven.be/itol/keynotes.htm

Bursaries

EURACT offered six bursaries for the Conference - the conditions for the bursaries were as follows:

• Amount: for the total sum 3000 Euros, 6 bursaries will be offered (with each bursary to provide a maximum of 500 Euros to cover the cost of travel, accommodation and the conference fee);
• Eligibility criteria: EURACT member (application received prior to the EURACT council meeting on 12-14 April 2018); an abstract accepted; priority given to EURACT members from low income countries.

The deadlines for the conference were as follows:

May 20, 2018: Deadline abstract submission
June 15, 2018: Notification of acceptance to authors
June 22, 2018: Deadline application for bursaries
July 1, 2018: Deadline early bird registration
July 30, 2018: Deadline registration and payment for oral, poster and workshop speakers
September 8, 2018: Registration deadline
September 21 - 22, 2018: EURACT 2018 conference

More information is available from the conference website – www.euract2018.org

Sincerely yours,

Prof. Jean-Marie Degryse (chair of the conference)

Dr. Jo Buchanan (EURACT president)