Aart Schene appointed honorary member Dutch Psychiatric Association

Aart Schene, theme Stress-related disorders, has received the honorary membership of the Dutch Association for Psychiatry (NVvP). The Professor of Psychiatry received the award because of his extraordinary efforts throughout his career to improve the quality of care for psychiatric patients.

For more than thirty years, Schene has been working as a psychiatrist, professor and researcher at the AMC, University of Amsterdam and the Donders Institute and Radboudumc in Nijmegen. With the honorary membership, the Dutch Association for Psychiatry wants to show its great appreciation for his initiatives to improve the quality of care for psychiatric patients and to improve standards that enable psychiatrists to do their work better. “With his versatile, energetic approach, he has had an incomparably large influence on the professionalization of care”, the NVvP states.

Depression expert

Schene contributed especially in the field of depression. He helped in the development of care programs for people with psychiatric disorders. He helped to optimize the quality of treatment of patients. And he actively advocated and organized the creation of guidelines, care standards and other quality-enhancing products for psychiatrists, staff and the mental health care system.

Schene was the first in the Netherlands to set up a care program for mood disorders (AMC, 1994) and as chairman of the National Steering Committee Care Programming in Mental Health Care (1997-2005) he was involved in the national set-up of care programs. Within the NVvP, after ten years of active membership in various committees, he worked for another six years as chairman of the Quality Care Committee and seven years as chairman of the AKWA GGZ Quality Council.