Greetings to the international community of Family Practice readers, authors and peer reviewers. I’m honoured to succeed Brendan Delaney as the new editorin-chief. In this inaugural editorial, I would like to introduce myself and discuss a few plans that have emerged from a recent strategic planning initiative. Best regards to Brendan and editorial assistant, Vivienne Tsimbili, both of whom will focus on new endeavours (Brendan will remain on as an associate editor). Our new editorial assistant is Louise Whelan, who has worked in publishing for >10 years, with experience as a production editor, team leader and journal publishing manager. She also worked as a freelance editorial assistant for a number of titles, where she acquired experience with the peer-review process and the ScholarOne manuscript management system. Louise holds a degree in marine biology, and she is an on-call marine mammal medic for the British Divers Marine Mammal Rescue organization. You can contact Louise at fampra.editorialoffice@oxfordjournals .org. I am confident that you will find her a pleasure to work with. Although there is a lot to learn about the Family Practice editorial processes from the perspective of the editor-in-chief, I have served as an associate editor since 2006. A year ago, I started as editor-elect focusing on strategic planning, which included a survey of the editorial board to obtain suggestions for process improvements and future directions. This resulted in a review of procedures to identify opportunities for reducing the time lag from manuscript submission to first decision. To that end, we have already instituted changes that take greater advantage of the efficiencies provided by the Scholar One system. A current project underway includes expanding the keyword list to improve our ability to match reviewers to manuscripts. Other process improvements will be opaque to authors and readers but should contribute to our objective to improve response time. Additional suggestions from the editorial board survey included: refresh the peer reviewer data base, increase the visibility of Family Practice internationally and develop a mechanism to acknowledge the service contributions of peer reviewers for the purpose of supporting applications for tenure or promotion. We are working on all of these! My own research interests currently center on identifying research best practices specific to primary care research and practice-based research network (PBRN) settings. Recently, I conducted a study titled