Welcome

Foreword from EFPC

The focus of our 2019 conference in Nanterre is primary care, the community and health equity for everyone, everywhere. We are privileged to welcome our keynote speakers and workshop teams to engage in discussion and debate in this area and to widen our knowledge and networks in primary care to enable us all to broaden our critical thinking and policy awareness. The wide range of research papers and posters will add the important dimension of evidence and conceptual understanding that is needed to advance health equity. It is especially important that we welcome our YOU&EFPC members, the growing generation of primary care practitioners and researchers who will take this work forward into the next half of the 21^st century.

Our understanding of the relation between social determinants such as poverty and health outcomes is well evidenced but we need to think harder and do better in primary care to enable access and equitable health care for all. This will require us to plan and provide different models of primary care that are integrated with other services, to re-conceptualise the meaning of community and how we interrelate with communities, to think ‘out of the box’ and innovate with models such as social prescribing and new technologies. Above all we must draw on the expertise, evidence, skills and compassion of all constituents of primary care, including the community itself, to ensure that we convey the deeply held values and beliefs inherent in the declarations of Alma-Ata and Astana and put this into policy and practice to deliver equitable health care to everyone, everywhere.

This conference will provide us with the opportunity for dialogue, to think broadly and creatively about such issues and our next steps towards a better future.