SHE PhD’s expose united their diversity at conferences

Jolien Pieters, former SHE PhD representative takes you along in her proud observations during the national NVMO conference.

On the 21st and 22nd of November last year the annual NVMO (The Dutch association of medical education) conference took place in the Eurovision song contest city Rotterdam. The theme of the congress was ‘from diversity to inclusion, together to optimal care for everyone!’.

The SHE PhD students were well represented with fifteen PhD’s, who presented their ongoing or recent published research with a wide variety of topics, “speaking about diversity and inclusion”. In total eight research papers were presented by SHE PhD’s:  

• On mentors' beliefs about their roles. 
• Patient involvement in lifelong learning. 
• The cost-benefit of selection.
• High-value cost-conscious care in the undergraduate medical curricula. 
• Teachers’ assessments conceptualisations of programmatic assessment.
• Cultural diversity in the medical curriculum.
• Quality culture and continuous quality improvement.
• The effects of curriculum revision on students’ results. 

Furthermore, three workshops were offered regarding:

• Integrating palliative care education in the undergraduate medical curricula;
• How to study smart, and
• The implementation of curriculum changes.

To show how diverse our group is, in addition, three posters were presented on the role of co‐regulation in medical students’ self‐regulated learning and on high-value cost-conscious care attitudes among stakeholders.

Besides our talks and presentations, there were many other things to do. The two days started with inspiring plenary talks on masculine professional stereotypes and teaching for social justice. They taught us powerful lessons about being privileged and taking responsibility to do good with it. During and between the sessions there was enough time to network and collaborate. At the end of the first day, we were treated with a dinner cruise on the river Maas in the historic harbor of the city.

The conference ended with Carolin Sehlbach winning the prize of best paper with her research on patient perceptions on physician performance evaluation. Her research is part of her thesis: ‘To be continued… Supporting physicians’ lifelong learning, which she will defend on Friday 21 February in Maastricht.