Globalisation will make our societies more creative and prosperous but also more vulnerable [^[1]]

As I write one cannot help but be aware of the challenges facing us as with the increasing globalisation of society; the moving of migrants from the Calais camp, the ongoing assault on Mosul and the imponderable issues of Brexit and negotiation across the four UK nations. These are the current news headlines. As we strive to preserve the dignity and equity of global values, the vulnerability of modern society and the subsequent ever increasing need for kindness and humanity are of paramount importance. ‘I would so want to be a loved refugee!’ comes to my mind. This was a take home message offered by a young participant after a session on migrant health I facilitated at the European Academy of Teachers of General Practice/Family Medicine in Slovenia. Some of the young family medicine doctors in the group had dealt with the thousands of refugees moving across Slovenia. They reported having less than a minute for each individual and hardly any drugs – not even sufficient amoxicillin for a day’s dose per suffering child – and the frustrations of language barriers. ‘What did they want to hear from me in that minute?’ was a desperate reflection offered by one of these young doctors. She was clearly still traumatised by the pressures placed on her clinical skills and her inability to offer adequate treatment and express her personal humane engagement with the refugees’ plight.

So how is this relevant to Education for Primary Care? Globalisation emphasises the need for us to ensure our young family medicine doctors are equipped for the challenges they will face in future health care; or indeed, as these Slovenian doctors illustrated, are already experiencing. This year has seen a remarkable increase in international submissions to the journal from across the world and the production of a special WONCA edition which is about to be launched at the WONCA World conference in Rio de Janiero. I am most grateful to Ron MacVicar with Guest Editors Allyn Walsh and Luisa Pettigrew for compiling this. Limited open access to the WONCA edition is available to increase engagement. The more we can work together to develop primary care education across the world, the less vulnerable we become as a profession. Harnessing new technology is intrinsic to this. We now publish on line more rapidly than ever before. Wider avenues for international collaboration are opening up to help meet, through education and training, the needs of globalisation. As so aptly phrased by Nelson Mandela ‘Education is (indeed) the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world’.[2]

This issue illustrates the creativity and innovation intrinsic to primary care education which will help support the needs of our future health care workforce. We complete the series of articles on patient safety focusing on complex less predictable systems. Articles cover the continuum of education across undergraduate to postgraduate learning environments. They embrace some fundamental training needs in health care such as tackling nutrition and obesity and the educational challenges of learning to listen, a crucially fundamental yet difficult skill. One paper calls for more socio-cultural elements within modern medical school curricula to embrace greater humanism and handling uncertainty. This bodes well for times ahead. Medical schools must change to ensure they deliver graduates skilled for movements in health care. Finally ‘The How to’ series on medical education research draws to a close with an article on qualitative research; one of the most appropriate tools for researching and achieving greater understanding of the fears and insecurities doctors in training experience in order to address these.

At our Editorial Board next month we will be planning for a new volume in 2017. Your feedback is always most welcome to help us develop and move on. Please feel free to contact us. I thank all involved in the journal’s 2016 production and very much look forward to ever increasingly diverse and inspiring contributions in 2017 as we strive to bring Education for Primary Care to the forefront of the full spectrum of clinical education.

Warmest best wishes

Val Wass
Editor