Sandra Van Dulmen
Faculty of Caring Science, Work Life and Social Welfare
Signature: SAVA
Prof. dr. Sandra van Dulmen is Adjunct Professor at the Faculty of Caring Science, Work Life and Social Welfare.
Prof. dr. Sandra van Dulmen studied Psychology. She graduated in 1987 (cum laude) and obtained her PhD in 1996 on a thesis titled ’Exploring cognitions in irritable bowel syndrome; implications for the role of the doctor’. Since 1995 she works at Nivel (Netherlands institute for health services research) in Utrecht, the Netherlands, as the manager of the research program Communication in Healthcare. In 2012, she was appointed as Professor at the Radboud university medical center in Nijmegen, the Netherlands and in 2022 as adjunct professor at the University of Borås in Sweden. She obtained a lot of grants for research in the field of provider-patient communication in, e.g., primary and palliative care, oncology, pediatrics, nephrology and genetics. Many of these projects focus specifically on communication-vulnerable (e.g., low health literate or migrant) patients or on the use of technology as a way to improve healthcare communication, shared decision-making and patient outcomes (e.g. self-management and medication adherence). This is done by developing and testing (on usability and effectiveness) - with patients as co-researchers - online communication- and selfmanagement-enhancing tools. She coordinates a large archive with 18,000 video/audio-recorded real-life provider-patient interactions in primary and secondary care, collected since 1975.
She has successfully supervised 24 PhD students and currently supervises 10 PhD students. She has published around 325 international papers in peer-reviewed journals and several books and book chapters. Her current Hirsch index is 43 (Web of Science).
Awards
In 2022 she received the Paul Tournier award from the International College for Person Centered Medicine for her ‘outstanding contribution in the field of person centered medicine’.