Building WONCA's advocacy potential - survey

Your chance to help, and benefit!

The WONCA SIG on Policy Advocacy is launching a new project to strengthen family medicine advocacy across our global network.

To begin, we are asking WONCA member organisations, and our Working Parties (WPs) and Special Interest Groups (SIGs) to complete a short survey.

It will help us understand:

• what advocacy tools and policy resources you already use
• what support or skills you need to make a stronger case for family medicine in your context

Your answers will guide the next steps of this project and help WONCA develop practical resources that members can use when engaging with policy makers and other decision-makers.

Take the survey

Please complete the survey here: Survey link

The survey should not take more than fifteen minutes to complete.

What WONCA is aiming to do

As part of our efforts, WONCA is aiming to compile a collection of policy documents that can be used to support efforts to develop and/or strengthen family medicine.

To that end, we invite you, as part of the survey, to provide any document you may have created or used to advocate for family medicine and its ongoing development. This collection of resources will be available online to all WONCA members.

We also welcome your suggestions about the type of documents and support you would find useful to advocate for family medicine.

What we mean by policy

Policy is defined as “a set of principles designed to guide decisions, and that can be used to lead to actions that achieve relevant outcomes”. We know many of these exist but are not all accessible.

We therefore welcome documents and links to documents housed on national and local websites, including those that may not be easily located.

Some of the documents identified as particularly pertinent to inform policy makers and other key stakeholders will be translated. The collection will also be mapped according to key topics and additional resources will be sought to address any critical gap.

What we are looking for

We are looking for documents in any language that:

• Support the development and strengthening of family medicine as a specialty: what it contributes, why it matters, how to develop it, etc.
  An example of such a document is the “WONCA Europe Statement on the Recognition of the Specialty of Family Medicine / General Practice in the European Region” which you can read here: Read the statement
• Have been prepared or updated within the last 5 years.
• Can be posted on the WONCA website.
• Aim to set or shape policy, understood here as “a set of principles designed to guide decisions, and lead to actions to achieve relevant outcomes”.

We are not looking for clinical policies or guidelines.

If your MO/SIG/WP has no such policy documents, please let us know, as this information is itself very important to us.

Three reasons to encourage you to reply

• The survey should not take more than fifteen minutes to complete.
• Prof Viviana Martinez-Bianchi has a personal message of thanks for you all, as strengthening our policy base and ability to advocate is a key part of her Presidency.
• Your replies will inform our ongoing efforts to ever more effective engage in policy development, eventually leading to new resources for us all to continue to develop our wonderful discipline.

Thank you for your help.

Take the survey now

Separate survey on education and training

At the same time, the educational needs of primary care and family medicine is being investigated in another survey led by our valued colleagues from the Department of Family and Community Medicine, University of Toronto.

Please reply to both, as the findings will build together into a cycle of support and education to help us all be more effective in this area.