How nice to close off 2019 with this new publication on The impact of mindfulness-based interventions on doctors’ well-being and performance. This systematic review was conducted by researchers Renee Scheepers, Helga Emke, Ronald Epstein and Kiki Lombarts.

Physicians’ work engagement and their experienced meaning of work go hand in hand. This is one of the conclusions from the national kick-off meeting on happiness and well-being of young doctors. Professors Kiki Lombarts and Antoinette de Bont analysed the data and report their preliminary results here (sorry, only in Dutch). The academic work on work engagement and well-being will continue in 2020. More importantly, the new generation of young doctors will actively keep striving for meaningful work and professional fulfillment. Spending time with patients seems to be the key in these efforts.

We look back on a successful conference of the Dutch Association of Medical Education (NVMO) in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. The Professional Performance researchers made several contributions:

• Prof. Kiki Lombarts presented the ‘patient safety study’, a study led by colleague and first author Milou Silkens, PhD. This study focussed on the question whether residents’ patient safety behaviour can be explained by learning and patient safety climates.
• Iris Jansen, PhD candidate, talked about her latest publication: to what extent is teamwork effectiveness of clinical teaching teams associated with residents’ learning climate.
• Iris and Kiki, together with Renee Stalmeijer, PhD, moderated a workshop entitled ‘Roll up your sleeves! Working on the learning climate’. In this workshop participants ‘worked on’ the learning climate within and between stakeholder specific groups. This resulted in valuable conversations and having more insight in each other’s perspective. We thank all the (51!) participants.

Hope to see you at next year’s NVMO Conference!

Tonight was the launch of the new movement Happy in/at Work. The new generation of young doctors (residents and gp’s in training) organized a national debate on what determines professional fulfillment for them. The organizations of young medical specialists and young GPs call for all healthcare stakeholders to be part of this movement and help remove barriers for physicians’ wellbeing and make meaning in work a high priority. Doctors and patients alike will benefit form more mental fit and professionally fulfilled doctors. In preparation of the national launch the research group PP&CC wrote a paper The Wellbeing of The New Generation Doctors (Dutch).

Hi everyone! My name is Rosa Bogerd, I am 26 years old and I am pleased to introduce myself as the newest member of the research group Professional Performance & Compassionate Care, at the department of Medical Psychology within the Amsterdam UMC. As a junior researcher I am hoping to develop my skills and knowledge within the research field of Compassionate Care and I am very excited about being a part of the team. Over a year ago I completed my Masters in Public Administration: Governance of Healthcare (Innovation) and my Masters in Philosophy, Bioethics and Health. Since I have been working outside of the medical academic field for a little year, I can now truly say that I am glad to be back! I have always been interested in the multiple facets, different dynamics and complexity of healthcare (systems). Combined with a strong tendency towards the ethical aspects and dilemmas of health and healthcare, I can only say that I am honored to be a part of the beautiful and inspiring Compassion Project. Let’s start!

The pursuit for high quality surgical care brings us to surgeons’ attitudes. Inspired by the work done for pilots, we looked at hazardous attitudes of surgeons, such as macho and anti-authorian behaviours. We developed a prototype tool to measure such attitudes. A new publication by Kirsten Dabekaussen, Renee Scheepers, Erik Heineman en Kiki Lombarts.

Kiki Lombarts wrote the new book Physicians’ Professional Performance: Between Time and Technology. The book is a plea for doctors with cool heads and warm hearts. It is the result of Prof. Kiki Lombarts’ reflections on working with physicians for over 25 years in the Netherlands and abroad. Lombarts identifies three pillars of professional performance – i.e., the constant pursuit of excellence, humanistic practice, and accountability for one’s own actions – which seem to reflect a shared ideal of many physicians. According to her, these three pillars should be further explored by the medical profession and should be translated into medical training and practice, and into policies to monitor and promote the quality of patient care. Curious? You may order here!

Do you know je KeyLime, the podcasts series Key Literature in Medical Education? The four critical experts, Jason Frank, John Serbino, Linda Shnell and Lara Varpio read, review, debate and rate self-selected medical education research papers. Their approach is both razor-sharp and friendly, and they seem to have fun together in talking about research and their own med ed experiences. We are honoured that one of our papers, the Acad Med paper by Alina Smirnova et al was picked for their podcast: Defining and Adopting Clinical Performance Measures in Graduate Medical Education: Where are We Now and Where Are We Going? Our work received high ratings (thank you!). They titled the podcast: The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Clinical Performance Indicators. Sounds like a great compliment to us! Listening to KeyLime is a great way to keep up with the med educ literature.

The learning climate is not only a ‘hot’ topic in the Netherlands. In Colombia learning climate is also recognized as an important contributor to the quality of residency training. For measuring the learning climate Colombian colleageus translated and investigated the Dutch measurement tool DRECT (Dutch Residency Educational Climate Tool). Milou Silkens from our PP&CC research group collaborated with the Colombian researchers. Read the paper here. Spoiler: validity and reliability of the Spanish version of the DRECT could be confirmed for the Colombian context.

The first article of PhD-candidate Iris Jansen was published in Medical Teacher. Together with Kiki Lombarts, Renée Stalmeijer and Milou Silkens, she studied to what extent teamwork effectiveness within teaching teams is associated with (1) the overall learning climate of residents, and (2) its affective, cognitive and instrumental facets? Effective teamwork within teaching teams benefits overall learning climates, however, not all the separate facets. Curious about the findings? The article can be found here: Team up! Linking teamwork effectiveness of clinical teaching teams to residents’ experienced learning climate

We are very happy to announce that the APH-QoC research program committee 2019 awarded us a grant for our proposed project ‘Quality of care and quality of caring: developing a compassion training for physicians’. In the project we aim to develop a patient and physician-informed compassion intervention for residents.
The project will be executed in close collaboration with our colleagues at  the VUmc.

The validation study of the Group Monitor has been accepted for publication in the Journal of Continuing Education in Health Professions! This makes the Group Monitor the first evidence-based 360-degree feedback GROUP instrument. With the help of the Group Monitor, perceptions of the group performance of physician groups are gathered from four respondent groups: (1) the medical specialists of the physician group itself, (2) specialists from adjacent groups and departments, (3) support staff, such as nurses and secretarial staff, and (4) hospital managers. Thanks to all the authors who contributed: Elisa Bindels, Benjamin Boerebach, Mirja van der Meulen, Jeroen Donkers, Myra van den Goor, Albert Scherpbier, Kiki Lombarts and Sylvia Heeneman.

The Amsterdam Vondel Parc was the ideal environment for a workshop on Residents’ Vitality. In this second and last part of residents’ training on personal vitality, the greatest challege was to make some authentic choices for one’s own vitality or well-being. Kiki Lombarts and Maarten Debets were leading this session. For all participants the outcome was a personal vitality plan. And a bit more energy we hope 🙂

This April the article titled “Exploring Validity Evidence Associated With Questionnaire-Based Tools for Assessing the Professional Performance of Physicians: A Systematic Review” has been published in Academic Medicine PhD-candidate Mirja van der Meulen and her colleague Alina Smirnova, and their team members:Sylvia Heeneman, Mirjam oude Egbrink, Cees van der Vleuten en Kiki Lombarts. With this review the authors investigated how much validity evidence there is, for the use of questionnaire-based tools to evaluate practicing physicians. You can read the whole article here!