Practising person-centred care. Selected abstracts from the virtual 26th WONCA Europe conference, 6–10 July 2021

BACKGROUND: From 6 to 10 July 2021, WONCA Europe and the Dutch College of General Practitioners as host organiser welcomed 1,266 family physicians/general practitioners, teachers, researchers, and students from 66 countries interested in sharing knowledge, experience and innovations in primary healthcare. METHODS: In cohesive sets of plenary presentations, round table sessions, and research masterclasses, aspects of patient care, research, and education around Practicing Person-Centred Care were presented and discussed. Actual topics in primary care such as covid-19, e-health and professional health, were covered in oral presentation sessions, one slide 5-minutes presentations, case presentations by young doctors and the e-poster gallery. All sessions were recorded and available on-demand for registrants until three months after the conference. All accepted abstracts have been published in the abstract book [https://www.woncaeurope.org/page/past-conference-abstract-books]. For this Journal, we selected the top 20 abstracts based on reviewers scores (mean of 3.5 or higher on a scale of 4) and consensus among members of the Scientific Committee. RESULTS: The selected abstracts are divided into the following themes: (1) clinical topics often encountered in primary care, such as acute chest pain, urinary tract infections, dementia, and covid-19 (N = 5); (2) personalised care and related issues such as addressing multimorbidity (N = 2); shared decision making and patient empowerment (N = 4); (3) overdiagnosis and overtreatment, focusing on deprescribing (N = 2); (4) health promotion and prevention, including mental health (N = 2); (5) quality and safety (N = 2); (6) professional development and education (N = 1); (7) research and innovation, including teleconsultation (N = 2).