Address an audience with the power to make a real difference
The International Forum on Quality and Safety in Healthcare has a rich history of supporting and energising the international movement for health and care improvement. We connect health and care leaders, practitioners and those with lived experience to collaboratively improve outcomes for our communities.
Call for Speakers is an invitation to submit a proposal to showcase an innovative project, scope of work, or inspire a new way of thinking.
By speaking at the conference, you will be part of a global movement to ignite change across healthcare networks and inspire an audience with the power to make a real difference.
You will be sharing strategies, your experience and thinking about improvement methodologies and approaches to driving sustainable transformation. This will give you the opportunity to inspire, lead and teach as well as reflect and offer peer support to healthcare improvers, including the next generation of health and care leaders.
As a speaker you will:
- Raise your profile as an improvement leader
- Bring attention to projects with a robust evidence base and reliable results
- Start conversations with an engaged community that can contribute to your thinking and strategies
What are we looking for?
The International Forum brings together people from around the world to improve patient outcomes by sharing ideas, projects, and experiences across different countries and healthcare systems. It creates opportunities to learn what works and what does not, while connecting healthcare professionals, patients, and communities to drive better care together.
We prefer content that:
• Is designed or led with patients or service users
• Shows how people and organisations can work together to improve care
• Shares new and innovative ideas
• Uses strong evidence and shows clear results
• Makes a real difference to patients and communities
We welcome applications from:
• Healthcare professionals and non-clinicians
• Patients and carers
• People from voluntary or social sectors
• Students
• First-time speakers
We want to include a wide range of people and perspectives in our event.
Patient representation and lived experience:
Submissions are expected to be co-produced with patients, service users, citizens and carers wherever possible.
We have representatives on these groups in all our planning committees, and are working to increase the representation of these groups as speakers and delegates.
Speaker submissions topics for Lisbon 2027
We want to hear about projects and initiatives that show impactful results under these six streams/topics:
1. Safety: The stream for work that designs harm out of systems before it happens. Submissions cover anticipatory and human-centred safety science, psychological safety, and how teams build resilience and recover well when things go wrong.
2. People: The stream about everyone healthcare depends on: the workforce, and the people who use services, their carers, families and communities. Submissions cover co-production, equity and inclusion, and the conditions that bring meaning, purpose and joy to work.
3. Populations: The stream for work that reshapes care around whole populations. Submissions cover the use of data, action on inequalities and inequities, the shift of care closer to home, and the alignment of services across systems and sectors.
4. Change: The stream for work on making change happen at scale. Submissions cover implementation, systems thinking, and the power of networks and movements to shift practice across teams, organisations and whole systems.
5. Science: The stream for the methods of improvement. Submissions cover rigorous methods and study designs, real-world evaluation, and learning systems, applied to deliver results and scale up interventions that hold up to scrutiny.
6. Leading: The stream for work on mobilising and equipping leaders in any context and at every level, to deliver better outcomes, equity, sustainability and workforce wellbeing. Submissions cover leadership development, distributed and informal leadership, and the role of leaders in culture, equity and system change.
7. Technology: The stream for work that integrates the best of digital and the best of human, to transform care, reduce burden, and reach outcomes we could not reach before.
You will be notified of the outcome of your submission by email in October 2026.
Please note that the email address that you supply on the Submitter Details page when submitting your proposal will be the email address used to correspond the results of your submission. If you change email addresses during this time, please let us know by emailing events@bmj.com so we can update our system.