New doctors in the WONCA Europe region have established a movement to promote the discipline of general practice/family medicine through:

1. Providing a forum, support and information for trainees and new GPs through access to WONCA Europe regional conferences and pre-conferences.
2. Establishing a communication network between European trainees and new GPs and identifying their concerns, doubts and needs and helping to address them.
3. Improving the quality of training programmes for general practice by establishing a central information database on European programmes, and setting quality standards.
4. Writing and publishing newsletters concerning the movement for national colleges and associations
5. Working with host organizing Committees in organising junior doctors preconference meetings held during WONCA Europe regional conferences
6. Collaborating with national colleges and associations in general practice, and stimulating the formation of national representation of new and future GPs
7. Collaboration with international organisations of general practice and the representation of the movement at international meetings.

This is a new and exciting movement, setting out on a journey of discovery, developing ideas for the discipline of general practice in the future. These ideas were set down in a meeting in January 2005 in Lisbon, the home port of Vasco da Gama, from where he set out on a similar voyage of discovery, and for this reason his name has been applied to the movement.

It was formally launched at the Kos WONCA Europe Conference in September 2005.

Successful Pre-conferences have been held in Florence 2006, Paris 2007, Istanbul 2008, Basel 2019, Malaga 2010 and Warsaw 2011.

We are looking forward to continued success in Vienna in 2012.

To help in achieving these ambitions each WONCA Europe organisation is asked to develop a robust process of identifying and sponsoring new and future general practitioners to the movement.

(The movement defines new and future doctors as those in training for general practice and in the first five years after qualification as a GP)