About the keynote

Present day health care is faced with important challenges in terms of increasing demands and costs and a shortage of people and financial means to meet these. Patients complain about inadequate and impersonal service, doctors and nurses succumb to ever increasing pressures. 

In her keynote, Anne Speckens will address how mindfulness and compassion can contribute to a more humane and compassionate health care. She will share her personal journey in medicine, with its obstacles and successes and her sources of inspiration. The presentation will include evidence, also from qualitative research, about the possible contribution of mindfulness and compassion to the well-being of patients with depression, ADHD and cancer and health care professionals themselves. She will provide some ideas about how to take things forward both in research and our professional and personal lives.

About the speaker

Anne Speckens is Professor of Psychiatry in the Radboud University Medical Centre in the Netherlands and Founder and Director of the Radboudumc Centre for Mindfulness. Her research focuses on the application of Mindfulness-Based Interventions (MBIs) in patients with both psychiatric and somatic conditions and health care professionals. She examines both clinical and cost-effectiveness and, in collaboration with the Donders Centre for Neuroscience, the possible working mechanisms of MBIs. She has over 130 peer-reviewed publications.

The Radboudumc Centre for Mindfulness offers mindfulness and compassion courses for both clinical populations with psychological or somatic conditions and for health care professionals. The Centre also offers a teacher training programme for professionals working in health care, education, criminal justice and businesses and organizes the annual Dutch symposium for mindfulness.

Read more here:  https://www.radboudumc.nl/en/people/anne-speckens