People: Our impact on students and society
What impact does UMC Utrecht’s education have on people and society?
Education forms the foundation of tomorrow’s healthcare. Our (future) care and health professionals can have a huge impact on patients and society. What students learn today shapes how they will treat patients, conduct research, and contribute to societal challenges tomorrow.
In 2025, therefore, The New Utrecht School focused not only on subject matter but also on personal development, social responsibility, and collaboration. The revised curricula are about to launch. Based on the philosophy of The New Utrecht School, these contribute directly to our mission.
Diversity & inclusiveness
In 2025, the Diversity & inclusiveness impulse team successfully completed the Sense of Belonging project. The aim of this project was to strengthen the sense of belonging and the 'sense of home' among students at Utrecht University. The project combined research on how students experience belonging with practical interventions for students, teachers, and staff. The interventions developed were compiled in the booklet Belonging@UU: Five initiatives to create an inclusive and supportive space where all students belong.
In 2025, the Supportive Classroom@UU workshop was also developed within the project. In this interactive workshop, teachers learn to develop pedagogical strategies to strengthen students’ sense of belonging. The Trimbos Institute included the workshop in its knowledge base under the title Creating Supportive Classrooms. As a result, its impact extends beyond UMC Utrecht alone.
Resilience and wellbeing
In 2025, the Resilience & Wellbeing impulse team developed a UMC Utrecht-wide, evidence-based vision on resilience and wellbeing. This vision provides direction for education and student support. It resulted in learning objectives and appropriate educational content for the new curricula in 2025. A practical toolkit for teachers and supervisors was also developed.
A new addition in 2025 was the ‘Conversation Wheel’: an accessible tool that stimulates dialogue about wellbeing and resilience in educational groups. We also actively focused on connecting people and initiatives across faculty programs, the UMC Utrecht Academy, and Postgraduate Medical Training. In doing so, we strengthened collaboration and knowledge sharing within our educational community.
Patient Participation & Community Engaged Learning
In 2025, the Patient Participation impulse team organized theater performances and film discussions for healthcare professionals, students, and patients’ families and loved ones. These sessions centered on powerful patient experience stories.
The performances and discussions deepened understanding of the person behind the patient and helped participants experience what shared decision-making truly means. This enables not only discussing patient participation, but actually experience it.
Interdisciplinary education & Interprofessional learning
The challenges in healthcare require collaboration across disciplines. In 2025, we organized two interdisciplinary Health Challenges within the Faculty of Medicine: the Muscle Disease Challenge and the Heart Disease Challenge.
In the first phase of this unique educational format, more than 600 bachelor’s students from Medicine, Biomedical Sciences, and Clinical Health Sciences worked together in a think-tank phase to develop innovative solutions to a relevant and complex healthcare problem. In the follow-up phase, students from seven programs jointly executed the “winning” research proposal as part of the Experimental Translational Medicine course.
Students could request expertise from professionals in six thematic hubs: Biomedicine, Biotechnology, Med Tech, AI, Entrepreneurship & Business and Medical Humanities. This teaches them to approach complex issues from multiple perspectives – an essential skill for the healthcare of tomorrow.
Translational Medicine & Life Sciences
Creative thinking and problem-solving ability are core competencies of scientific researchers. The Graduate School of Life Sciences explicitly focuses on these skills, including through the Visual Narratives workshop. In this workshop, students reflect on their creative process and translate it into their own research practice.
To increase impact, the workshop was further developed in 2025 and included in the national Transition Makers Toolbox, an open source educational platform that aligns with the Inner Development Goals Framework. Through this, UMC Utrecht also inspires an international community of teachers and educational developers.