Working Party on Research Annual Report
Photo: The working party meets in RIO 2016
Prof Felicity Goodyear-Smith, chair of WONCA Working Party on Research provides the working party's Annual Report July 2016 to June 2017.
The WONCA Working Party on Research (WWPR) has been increasingly active in the past year, our membership is growing and a Google discussion group has been set up.
Books
Our book,
‘International Perspectives on Primary Care Research’ (Editors WWPR Chair Felicity Goodyear-Smith & Bob Mash, 2016, CRC Press, pp. 255) was formally launched at the Rio meeting 2016, and we have signed an agreement with CRC Press for a second book, ‘
How to do Primary Care Research’. Chapters have been commissioned, several have already been returned and a couple even finalised. It will be published in 2018.
Panels
The WWPR continues to run panels / workshops whereby different countries compare how their primary care is organised, using regional coordinators in the different WONCA regions. A template to prepare the slides is provided.
• In 2017 at the WONCA East Mediterranean Regional Conference in Abu Dhabi, Prof Chris van Weel led a session in which the health systems of Bahrein, Egypt, Lebanon, Qatar, Sudan and the United Arab Emirates were compared. A paper for publication has been prepared (‘Primary Health Care Policy Implementation in the East Mediterranean region’).
• A panel was also held with four countries (Ukraine, Romania, Macedonia and Finland) at WONCA Europe Regional Conference in Prague in June, led by Prof Mehmet Ungan.
• Further workshops comparing systems in México, Republic of Dominicana, Argentina, Paraguay, Ecuador and Panamá (WONCA Iberoamericana-CIMF Regional Conference 2017, Lima, Peru, led by Lidia Caballero and Jacqueline Ponzo) and Australia, Malaysia, Mongolia, Myanmar, Thailand and Vietnam (WONCA Asia Pacific Regional Conference2017, Pattai, Thailand, led by Ryuki Kassai), are scheduled for August and November respectively.
Research Capacity Building
Members of WWPR ran a workshop on scientific writing at the WONCA Europe Regional Conference in Prague, Czech Republic in July 2017, and a further one is planned for Thailand in November. A master set of slides on how to write (including sections on general tips and on preparing a paper for a peer-reviewed journal) is available for members running these workshops, as well as an interactive exercise on critiquing and correcting a poorly written abstract.
CARD
A member of the WWPR, Dr Ronny Gunnarsson from Queensland, Australia, has started the Collaborative Advantage Research Database (CARD). This database of research projects is open to all countries (currently predominantly Australia). It aims to facilitate collaboration by enabling researchers to find each other. It contains a simple form collecting basic information with only one registration required, even if multiple organisations are involved in a particular project. See https://au.researchweb.org/is/jcu/document/171661.
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