During the COVID-19 pandemic, resident well-being was at risk. We therefore developed a well-being program aimed to help them maintain their health during the crisis. In this study we inquired residents’ perceptions of their well-being and how they managed to stay well. The results are now available. Supporting resident well-being on and outside the ICU during the COVID-19 pandemic: the use and value of institutional interventions and individual strategies.

How to combine physicians’ accountability requirements and their professional development aspirations? Using a design-based approach, the Amsterdam Medical Center designed a new system integrating and balancing the two. Buy-in from medical specialists and an incremental implementation process contributed to the final design, which was found to be positively received by the hospital-based physicians. Read the publication by Elisa Bindels, PhD et al here.

What happens to performance improvement potential when doctors overrate themselves? Mirja van der Meulen, PhD et al. answer this question in their latest study. Please click here for the results.

Kiki Lombarts returned from California, where she spent a full academic year as the Presence-CASBS 2020-21 fellow at Stanford University. CASBS is the renowned Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. The Presence program, led by Stanford Medicine’s Prof. Abraham Verghese, is dedicated to humanising healthcare.

Kiki is back in Amsterdam where she continues her work in professional performance, compassion, well-being and the feminization of medicine.

We invite you to the very first (but definitely not last) edition of APH Junified! APH Junified is a yearly returning event exclusively for APH junior researchers (including PhD candidates and post docs). The first edition, themed ‘Next Generation Researchers’, takes place on September 2 at Rosarium, Amsterdam.

More details on the program will soon be published on the APH website, so stay tuned.
We look forward meeting you all very soon!

Kevin Eva – Editor in Chief of the journal Medical Education – interviewed Iris Jansen in a podcast about her article “An act of performance: Exploring residents’ decision-making processes to seek help”. You can listen the conversation of 12 minutes via iTunes or the website.

The Dutch Association for Cardiologists (NVVC) is afraid that the well-being of her members is being jeopardized by the high work pressure (Dutch) cardiologists often experience. In order to act properly, the union’s Quality Committee aims to get insight in this well-being of her members. It planned to do an inventory which should function as the foundation for future recommendations and a so called “standard” for a healthy cardiology practice in the Netherlands. The inventory and accompanying research will be performed by PP&CC.

Rosa Bogerd will be in the lead of the inventory and presentation/ reporting of the results. Together with the team we made questionnaire, existing of the literature’s most prominent constructs related to burn-out and fulfilment, that will provide insight into well-being, work pleasure and professional fulfilment, work pressure, time for patients, resilience, feedback culture, team atmospheres, etc amongst Dutch cardiologists. The questionnaire was filled in by 320 cardiologists. After analyzing the data, not only will they be used in the association’s Quality of Care report, but they will also be published in a scientific paper.

In times of change we may need it more than ever: a moment of silence and reflection. Barbara Doelenamn – one of our partners – contributes to this by offering a daily meditation through the International Compassion Community. As true researchers of Professional Performance & Compassionate Care we too will participate and investigate this for at least 6 months. All healthcare providers, and others interested, are welcome to join.

The assessment of physicians’ professional performance is of great importance. Not only does the public want to know that their physicians are fit-to-practice, but we also want to help physicians improve their professional performance. An often used method to assess physicians, are questionnaires. With these questionnaires physicians can gather feedback from multiple respondents: also known as multisource feedback. Yet to use these questionnaire for the assessment of physicians we need to make sure that they are providing valid data. The thesis “Assessment of physicians’ professional performance using questionnaire-based tools” has been written to investigate this matter. Within this thesis several topics are enlightened: “What kind of evidence for the validity of using questionnaire-based tools for the assessment of physicians is there already?”, “Do physicians who deliver high-quality health care receive high scores from their colleagues?” and “Does the professional performance of physicians actually improve after receiving multisource feedback?”. To find out more about these topics, and the answer to these questions: please click here!

Mirja van der Meulen defended her thesis in Maastricht.

In this multicenter observational study we investigated associations of job demands and resources with patient-related burnout among physicians. We found that physicians  with positive patient relationships were less likely to experience patient-related burnout, even in the presence of excessive bureaucracy. Therefore, positive physician-patient relationships may be supported to reduce the likelihood of physicians’ patient-related burnout. Read the paper by R. Scheepers, PhD et al, published in BMJ Open.

PhD candidate Maarten Debets and colleagues compared the ratings of anesthesiology residents about their supervisor’s teaching performance (SETQ) measured by five- and seven-point response scales. More specifically, we looked at the variability of the ratings and how residents used the additional response categories. Both the five and seven-point answer scales provide valid measurements of the faculty’s teaching performance. However, the seven-point answer scale offers residents the opportunity for a more nuanced evaluation. Residents mainly made use of this opportunity for the positive response categories. Switching from five- to seven-point scales can be beneficial. Read the article Variability of residents’ ratings of faculty’s teaching performance measured by five- and seven-point response scales, here!

Physicians’ work-related well-being  is crucial for the quality of care. Maarten Debets et al. describe how they developed, piloted and evaluated a well-being program for physicians, published in Perspectives on Medical Education. In this paper the authors present the lessons learned in this process and they present 7 practical tips for others who want to design well-being interventions for health care professionals. The paper can be found here.

We are more than proud that Kiki Lombarts has the honor to be a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (CASBS) at Stanford University for the full academic year 2020-2021. Her position is supported by Stanford Medicine’s Presence Program lead by Prof. dr Abraham Verghese. The mission of the Presence Program is to humanize healthcare. Kiki Lombarts will support the program and hopes to ultimately contribute to improving patient care and physicians’ professional fulfillment. She will definitely enjoy  a year of inspiration and reflection.

Joining efforts the research group PP&CC and software developer NEBU were able to design, and now launch!,  our new online platform for easy, safe and evidence-based evaluations of physicians’ professional performance. Hurray to the Perito platform!
Perito supports medical specialists and residents in their continues professional development using our validated, research-based (and well-known) tools such as SETQ, D-RECT, TeamQ and INCEPT questionnaire. We are extremely proud of our new platform, and we are now able to offer our measurement tools and deliver the results in attractive performance reports. If you are interested in using our tools please contact us or take a look at our website: www.peritoprofessionalperformance.nl.

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!