The European Federation for Medical Informatics (EFMI) 2022 Special Topic Conference (STC) was held in Cardiff, Wales, on September 7–8, 2022. The Scientific Programme Committee (SPC) was co-chaired by Dr Philip Scott, Programme Director at the University of Wales Trinity Saint David and Chair of BCS Health & Care, and Professor John Mantas, Director of the Health Informatics Laboratory, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece.

The theme of STC 2022 was “Digital Professionalism in Health and Care: Developing the Workforce, Building the Future”. This theme emphasized the vital need for professional education, training and continuing development of the health and care informatics workforce. This includes health and care practitioners who work in informatics and informatics practitioners who work in health and care.

Seminal reports such as the Topol Review have stressed the importance of equipping health and care staff with the skills and knowledge that they need to make effective use of digital technology. Equally, multiple failures of digital projects in health and care demonstrate that simply relocating IT generalists into this specialist field is not a guaranteed formula for success. Much learning is of course transferable from other industries, but the unique complexities of the data, information standards, knowledge, working environment and the typically under-resourced legacy infrastructures of health and care create challenges that demand suitable education and training. Such an informed perspective helps to counter the commonplace commercial and political exaggeration of what technology can offer, and enables focus on realising benefits that can actually be achieved by the usually more limited reality.

These proceedings present full papers and short communications covering a broad range of topics and methods in informatics education and training, as well as a smaller selection from the broader subdomains of biomedical informatics. The proceedings are published online with open access and indexed in the major bibliographic databases such as Medline and Scopus to ensure visibility to the wider scientific community.

We would like to thank all members of the SPC for their hard work and commitment to manage the submissions and the programme: Dr Parisis Gallos, Dr Arriel Benis, Professor Kaija Saranto, Dr Ivana Ognjanović, Professor Andrew Ware and Professor Ian Wells. We also thank all of our authors for submitting their work, our peer reviewers who volunteered their time and expertise to ensure the quality of the programme, and Professor Wendy Dearing, University of Wales Trinity Saint David, for leading the work of the local organizing committee, which handled all the practical arrangements for the conference.

Dr Philip Scott and Professor John Mantas

SPC Co-chairs