New leadership for WP on Quality and Safety
The WONCA Working Party on Quality and Safety has used 2026 to renew its leadership and sharpen its focus, building on the work of previous chairs and setting a clear direction for the years ahead. The Working Party has taken the opportunity of a change of leadership to review how it works, strengthen its communication, and concentrate on the areas where family medicine can make patient care safer.
An interim Executive Committee is now in place, chaired by Klaus von Pressentin, with Joel Lehmann as Secretary. The committee brings together colleagues from Africa, Europe, Iberoamerica and Asia-Pacific, and has adopted a flexible, task-based way of working so that members can contribute to specific pieces of work rather than carrying everything at once. Dorien Zwart has joined as President of EQuiP, the European Society for Quality and Safety in Family Practice, strengthening a long-standing partnership.
A clear priority for the year has been regional development. In Africa, the Working Party joined PRIMAFAMED to hold an e-workshop on quality and safety in African primary care, bringing colleagues together to identify shared priorities and to explore a dedicated regional network. That work will continue at the WONCA Africa Regional Conference in Gaborone, Botswana. In the Iberoamericana-CIMF region, similar conversations have begun about forming a regional quality and safety group. The aim throughout is a Working Party that reflects the whole global community of family doctors, not only those regions that have historically been most active.
Alongside this, the Working Party has renewed its collaboration with the WONCA Human Factors Group, opening the way for shared work on patient safety, systems thinking and education. It also continues to work with partners including EQuiP, the OECD and ISQua, and remains engaged with WONCA's work on accreditation standards and the Prescribing Wisely initiative.
Education remains central. Members contributed to EQuiP sessions at the WONCA Europe Conference in Paris, including workshops on deprescribing, clinician wellbeing and quality improvement, and further webinars on patient safety and quality improvement are being planned.
Finally, the Working Party is investing in its future leaders. It has begun an open process to bring a representative of the WONCA Young Doctors' Movement onto the Executive Committee, particularly from Africa, Asia-Pacific or the Iberoamericana-CIMF region, and is working with young doctors' networks to create opportunities in webinars, conferences and regional initiatives. Supporting the next generation of quality and safety leaders, the committee notes, is one of the surest ways to keep this work alive across the wider family medicine community.
Young doctors, and any family doctors interested in quality and safety who would like to get involved in the Working Party's work, are warmly invited to get in touch with the Chair at qualitysafety@wonca.com. You can read more about the Working Party on its page on the WONCA website.