I thought I knew my topics for the keynote address I’ll give in eight months, at Sydney’s October WONCA Conference. I’d include what we Family Doctors have in common, beneath and beyond the wide diversities of our local contexts. I’d discuss the growing gaps between our health and welfare systems, and how to bridge them. I’d speak about developing a common sense of professional identity for our new era, and about recovering and strengthening our global community. World health systems are transforming; tempting though it may be to cling to past structures, our systems do need updating.

I thought I knew. Meantime, devastating earthquakes, floods, famines, missile strikes… Who knows what our world will have confronted by October – perhaps even explosions of care-giving, life-saving interventions, breakthroughs into peace? Given that planning of any sort requires a presumption of continuity, ‘planning for the future’ – even just a keynote address – seems at this moment to be an act of hubris.

Nonetheless, I shall plan my talk. Far worse than planning badly is to meet the future without having made any plans at all! The reassuring reality of ‘the continuity of change’ allows me to predict the ‘future’ and assert that, by October, 2023:
• The urgency to act on this Conference’s themes of Recovery, reconnection and revival will be even greater;
• We Family Doctors will still be ideally situated to identify and plan what actions are needed to accommodate to our world’s altered here-and-now;
• We will need to redefine our role in our transforming health systems’ structures, certainly at the organizational level, and in our everyday clinical practices as well;
• Flexibility must be built into our renewed structures to help us tackle future changes, which are guaranteed to come.

I look forward to meeting you.