Introduction from Dutch College about WONCA Europe 2021 Virtual Conference

Dear Colleagues

I would like to introduce myself by means of this email and immediately take the opportunity to inform you about the WONCA Europe Conference 2021.

My name is Wendy Borneman, and as of June 1, 2020, I was appointed as President of the Dutch College of General Practitioners (NHG), succeeding Rob Dijkstra.

I work as a general practitioner in a small village in the south of the Netherlands.

For the past four years I was a board member of the Dutch Association of General Practitioners (LHV).

In that capacity, I have hosted the Dutch reception during WONCA Europe conferences, in recent years together with Rob. Some of you may have already met me there. I was also part of the Dutch delegation to UEMO during that time.

In the past, I worked in business and IT, as I was originally trained as a computer science engineer, before going into medicine.

Currently, we are redesigning WONCA Europe 2021 as we will not be able to organise a fully physical conference in Amsterdam. Yet, we really would like to achieve the best conference experience possible in these uncertain COVID-19 times. As soon as we have a format to share, we will inform you all. We might as well ask for your collaboration and input on this.

I would like to introduce to you my colleagues Dorien Zwart, President of the WONCA Europe Conference 2021, and Jako Burgers, Chair of the Scientific Committee of the WONCA Europe Conference 2021.

Dorien works as a general practitioner in De Bilt, a small town in the middle of the Netherlands. Besides her clinical work, she is an academic involved in education and research at the University Medical Center (UMC) Utrecht. Her research focuses on quality and safety in general practice, specifically concerning care transitions, medication safety and diagnostic safety during acute care telephonic triage. Presently, Dorien chairs the department of general practice of the UMC Utrecht.

You might already know Jako, who took the initiative for organising the conference in the Netherlands. He owns a general practice in Gorinchem, a small town south from Utrecht, holds a chair on ‘Promoting Personalised Care in Clinical Practice Guidelines’ at the Department of Family Medicine of Maastricht University, and is advisor of the board of the Dutch College of GPs.

We hope to meet you in 2021!
Kind regards, also on behalf of Dorien Zwart and Jako Burgers,

Wendy Borneman