Annette Boenink, psychiatrist, is the head of the Consultation-Liaison Psychiatry in Amsterdam UMC, location Vumc. She studied Medicine at the University Maastricht – enjoying the experimental small group educational system -, and specialized in Psychiatry at the UMCG in Groningen. Afterwards she worked at the Psychiatric CL-Service at the VU Hospital in Amsterdam, at the time headed by Frits Huyse. She succeeded him after his resignation, and building on his work, she expanded the CL service into a full-fledged hospital psychiatry department with a Medical – Psychiatry Unit and an outpatient clinic: the Amsterdam UMC Centre for Psyche & Soma.
Annettes commitment to delivering integrated care that is founded on an understanding of a patient’s values, is accompanied by a commitment to teaching. Education was also the topic of her PhD thesis titled: “Teaching and Learning Reflection on Medical Professionalism”.
She participated in the EACLPP Workgroup on Training in Consultation-Liaison Psychiatry and Psychosomatics. She is an active member of the EAPM Special Interest Group Integrated Care and Management of Complexity, and of the Intermed consortium.

She contributed to Dutch guidelines about C-L Psychiatry, General Hospital
Psychiatry and field standards for Med-Psych Units. She co-edited Dutch textbooks about Consultation-Liaison Psychiatry and Hiv and psychiatry and wrote book chapters about Medical care for psychiatric patients, and about Multidisciplinary care.

Annette has been a board member of the National organization of Consultation-Liaison and Hospital Psychiatrists (ACZP) and the Dutch Federation for Hospital Psychiatry (NFZP).

Her current interests are the implementation of Shared Decision Making and fostering interprofessional learning around integrated care for complex patients.

Professor Bernd Löwe, MD, is Full Professor and Head of the Department of Psychosomatic Medicine and Psychotherapy at the University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf, Hamburg, Germany (UKE). Previously, he held clinical and research positions at the Medical University Hospitals in Heidelberg, Germany, and Indianapolis, USA. Dr Löwe is an internist, specialist in psychosomatic medicine and psychotherapy, psychologist and psychotherapist.

Dr Löwe has devoted his research to the interaction of somatic and psychological factors in various medical conditions¸ including gastroenterological, cardiac and infectious diseases as well as functional somatic syndromes and somatic symptom disorders. This work led to the research unit 5211 “SOMACROSS” on persistent somatic symptoms, funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) since 2021, of which he is the spokesperson. Dr Löwe has also developed and validated a number of internationally used psychometric instruments, including self-report questionnaires for anxiety (GAD-7), somatic symptom severity (SSS-8), psychological distress associated with somatic symptoms (SSD-12), treatment expectations (TEX-Q) and many others. He has founded several local, national and international research groups, including EURONET-SOMA, a group of European scientists aiming to improve the diagnosis and treatment of persistent somatic symptoms.

He is the author of more than 400, mostly highly cited, scientific articles and book chapters (approx. 70,000 citations). He is on the editorial board of several scientific psychosomatic journals. In 2020 he was awarded the Wayne Katon Research Award of the Academy of Consultation Liaison Psychiatry (ACLP) for his current studies on psychopathology in the medically ill.

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