Although it doesn’t seem that long ago since the Enhancing Practice Conference 2016 was held at QMU Edinburgh, one of the International Practice Development Collaborative (IPDC) member groups, the Basel, Bern and Zurich Network in Switzerland, is busy planning the next conference. This takes place in Basel on 22-24 August 2018. The conference website is live at enhancing-practice-conference.org, with registration and the call for abstracts now open. Abstracts should address any one of the following healthcare priorities:

• Leading and leadership within practice development
• Fostering healthy workplace cultures
• Facilitating intergenerational person-centred cultures

The Enhancing Practice conferences are known as an international forum for anyone connected to practice development and person-centredness. The IPDC invites professionals from clinical practice, leadership, management, education, research and health policy to register. In fact, why not submit an abstract for a concurrent session – a ‘show and tell’ display, creative space or symposia?

These conferences tend to have some of the traditional conference features that everyone will recognise, but also other features that are not so often seen and which make them more friendly, engaging and interesting. For example, the ‘show and tell’ displays are creative spaces where less formal or academic presentations can take place. That makes these events really worth participating in and indeed, these alternative formats are often the spaces in which the best learning takes place. If you want a bit more evidence about the diversity of the conference, look at the titles of these keynote sessions we can look forward to in Basel:

• Dance and leadership: how leaders and followers relate and influence each other
• Compassionate leadership for high-quality, compassionate healthcare
• Swarm intelligence in honey bees
• Learning to improve: challenging context and culture

This article by Jan Dewing is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial 3.0 License.