Adrienne Cullen Lecture

The Adrienne Cullen Lecture took place on Tuesday, April 8, 2025, from noon to 1 p.m. The theme is "Difficult decisions and their aftermath: a call for openness".

• You can review the Dutch lecture with Dutch subtitles via this link.  
• You can review the lecture with an English speech interpreter via this link. 

Marc Rietveld, spiritual counselor at UMC Utrecht, gave a lecture titled: 'Difficult decisions and their aftermath: a call for openness'. In caring for our patients, we often face dilemmas. Dilemmas where there is no ideal solution and every choice has both advantages and disadvantages. Openness about the choice we make and the inevitable damage this causes is important for the relationship of trust between healthcare provider and patient and their loved ones. In his lecture, Marc provided concrete examples of areas of tension and dilemmas in healthcare and how to deal with them. 

The spouse talks about her experience at UMC Utrecht where her now-deceased husband received a yellow card for verbally aggressive behavior. Lack of clarity about the reason for and consequences of this card made the situation even worse. Through a good conversation about mutual expectations, the situation calmed down. The yellow card doesn't seem to have had negative consequences for the care provided, but there was significant stress, including within the family. To what extent could this have been prevented? 

A discussion about healthcare dilemmas with a panel followed, led by Astrid Janssens, Professor of Patient and Public Participation. 

The Adrienne Cullen Lecture took place on Tuesday, June 4, 2024, from noon to 1 p.m. The theme was ‘Switching smoothly’: how do we avoid loose ends when transferring patients in the care network’.  

•  You can review the Dutch lecture with Dutch subtitles via this link.   
• You can review the lecture with an English speech interpreter via this link.

by Dorien Zwart, Professor of Family Medicine 

Title: From weak link to switching smoothly. 

Transferring from one organization or care provider to another is a well-known risky moment in the care trajectory of patients. Despite widely accepted professional guidelines on timely and accurate information transfer, technological tools to support the process and a fair amount of scientific studies on improvement interventions, it remains a weak link in care. How do we avoid loose ends when transferring patients in the care network so that continuity of care is not at risk?

This patient with multiple disorders undergoes spinal surgery at UMC Utrecht by a neurosurgeon. She is then admitted to a rehabilitation center. There she develops a large bulge in her abdomen, her "basket ball”. An ultrasound and CT scan show no cause. The neurosurgeon sends the patient back to her primary care physician. The family physician receives no transmission about the bulge and must put in a lot of effort  to take over care properly.

Led by Astrid Janssens, Professor of Patient and Public Participation, a discussion followed on the importance of proper handover in the healthcare network. Participants are:  

•  Dorien Zwart, Professor of Family Medicine and Practicing Family Physician  
•  Robert van den Broek, Internist-Elder Medicine  
•  Romy Vijzelaar, Resident Hospital Medicine 
•  Richard Bos, patient representative   

Practical information
The Adrienne Cullen lecture took place on Friday, March 10, 2023, from noon to 1 p.m.  

• You can watch the Dutch lecture with Dutch subtitles via this link.  
• You can watch the lecture with an English speech interpreter via this link. 

Openness when something goes wrong in healthcare: the patient and the young doctor 

The theme of the fifth Adrienne Cullen lecture was "The Patient and the Young Doctor”. What is the role of a young doctor when something goes wrong in healthcare and what does he or she need to deal with it properly? Patients in a university medical center, in addition to interacting with nurses, primarily interact with doctors in training to become specialists (aios). These young doctors are in training and are supervised in this by a medical specialist (supervisor). The young doctor is the link between the patient/close relatives and the medical specialist.  

Lecture by Shirin Bemelmans - Lalezari, cardiothoracic surgeon at the UMC Utrecht

Title: The patient and the young doctor
In her lecture, Shirin focused on the theme of vulnerability. How vulnerable you are as a patient, as a young doctor and as a supervisor. As a human being. What does a (possible) mistake do to you as a human being, what feelings can this evoke and how can you deal with them. She also mentioned the importance of learning to reflect in the training situation and as a supervisor to pay attention not only to the substantive aspect of the event, but also to the emotion of the doctor involved. This is also important to allow the role of the young doctor to be fulfilled as well as possible and thus to keep the relationship with the patient/close relatives as pure as possible.

Film  
The family of a patient talks about the situation with their son in which information was lost due to many transfers and different caregivers with negative consequences for the quality of care.  

Panel discussion
Astrid Janssens, professor of patient and public participation
Shirin Bemelmans – Lalezari, cardiothoracic surgeon
Fia Cialdella, physician-researcher
Filip de Vos, oncologist and educator  

The conversation was about how a young doctor deals with his role and his part in events that harm a patient. How do you make sure the patient has confidence (again) in what you do. What does the young doctor need to discuss mistakes or intense situations in a safe environment. How can the young doctor add value to communication with the patient and close relatives. How to create a safe learning environment in which the young doctor learns to reflect on his own actions.

The fourth Adrienne Cullen lecture took place on Friday, March 25, 2022.

• This lecture was online in Dutch, you can view the lecture here.
• The lecture could also be followed with live English translation and Dutch subtitles, you can view it here.

Hans Brölmann gave a lecture ‘Learning from incidents; pure culture!’ about the importance of open communication by healthcare professionals after incidents or calamities. An open and honest conversation with patients and their relatives helps both patient and healthcare professional to process the traumatic experience faster and better. Learning and improving also concerns (the communication about) the calamity investigation and its reporting. 

Hans Brölmann is co-founder of the foundation for Openness after Incidents and author of the manual: ‘Openness after incidents in healthcare’. He is a former gynecologist.

Experiences and panel discussion
Mr. Jeu Boelen told in a video about an incident in which his wife Mirjam died and the impact of the follow-up process, including the calamity investigation. He was in the studio to discuss this further during the panel discussion led by Hans van Delden. Other participants in the panel discussion were Hans Brölmann and Mariëlle Emmelot-Vonk, chair of the UMC Utrecht Emergency Committee.

The online meeting took place on Friday April 16 2021. Click here to watch (the lecture is in Dutch). During this meeting we discussed the importance of patient and peer support after an incident, shared personal experiences and discussed what we have learned to improve in openness after an incident. A patient and a doctor shared their experiences with an incident in a film.

Mrs. Cordula Wagner from NIVEL, an independent research institute, shared the results from the project “When things go wrong, about the consequences of calamities for patients and relatives and consequences of disclosure”.

The second Adrienne Cullen lecture was held at UMC Utrecht on Friday May 10, 2019. Keynote speaker was Andrew Foster, CEO of Wrightington, Wigan & Leigh (WWL) Foundation Trust, who shared his experience on reducing incidents in his organization as well as on improving the quality of care. Foster was brought up personally by Adrienne Cullen.

The first Adrienne Cullen lecture took place at UMC Utrecht on Friday April 13, 2018. This first lecture was about Adrienne Cullen herself who was a victim of a medical mistake. In 2011, the results of a tissue biopsy that showed that she had cervical cancer did not reach her treating physician at UMC Utrecht. Two years later, the mistake came to light, but by then the cancer had already metastasized, with fatal consequences for the patient. Adrienne Cullen passed away in December 2018.