In memoriam Yvonne Deliana van Leeuwen
On 1 May 2019, Dr Yvonne Deliana van Leeuwen passed away at the age of 67.
She worked at the Department of Family Medicine as an associate professor and as head of the graduate programme in family medicine. She studied medicine in Groningen and after six months of internal medicine training in Italy, she went on to study family medicine at the ‘Rijksuniversiteit Limburg’. Her general practice trainer in Brunssum became her life partner. She then worked as a caretaker while attending lectures at the Hogeschool voor Theologie en Pastoraat [University of Applied Sciences in Theology and Pastoral Care] in Heerlen. In 1981, she began working at what is now Maastricht University.
Initially, she was interested in testing and evaluation in medical education, but later she focused on education in family medicine: supervision of general practitioners in training, teaching, as well as testing and evaluation. She made essential and prominent contributions to a national system of testing, in particular through the development of a knowledge test; she devised the first National Experimental Knowledge Test in 1987, which, from 1992, became known as the Landelijke Huisartsgeneeskundige Kennistoets (LHK) [National Family Medicine Knowledge Test]. This topic was the subject of her thesis ‘Growth in knowledge of trainees in general practice: figures on facts’ with which she obtained her PhD in 1995. In 1986, she completed a one-year programme in scientific research in family medicine.
From 1994, she followed an experimental postgraduate training programme for general practitioners in the context of the Stimuleringsprogramma Gezondheidsonderzoek [Health Research Stimulation Programme]. She developed expertise in various aspects of general practice medicine: hearing disorders, first-line ophthalmology, chronic pain and palliative medicine. Her teaching skills were clearly reflected in her role as coordinator of the cardiovascular disease training programme for general practitioners.
We at the Department of Family Medicine describe Yvonne as warm and trustworthy, eloquent, unconventional, colourful and remarkable. A serious illness cut her life short; she still supervised another PhD student and was actively involved in the philosophical discourse at home and abroad. She was known for her great determination in seeking explanations and cures for unbearable, inexplicable symptoms (including her own disease history), together with her Witte Raven club.
Yvonne taught us that we have a duty to fulfil outside the consultation room. In addition to being a scholar, general practitioner and trainer, she was also active socially. Several times a year, Yvonne organised lunch presentations on topics at the interface between the profession and society, called 'broodjes verstand' [‘sandwiches of understanding’].
Yvonne said goodbye to us with a substantive symposium in 2017, in which she used modern ‘flipped classroom videos’ and her own lecture to let us explore and, above all, to get us involved.
She took her very last steps in the hospice where she had taught the volunteers who surrounded her.
Prof. Jean Muris
Chairman of the Department of Family Medicine