Swiss Center for Flourishing in Medicine
Medicine that lets you flourish, not just survive.
SCFiM is a Swiss-wide network of educators, researchers, and clinicians helping physicians and medical students thrive — in the clinic and at home.
A QUESTION, BEFORE YOU READ ON
Medicine trained you to endure — and endurance got you this far. What if it was only half the training?
Our mission
We foster a medical culture grounded in mindfulness, (self-)compassion, and (self-)reflection — so that the people who care for others can also care for themselves.
Flourishing is more than burnout prevention. It's about the quality of life of the person at work and at home, and the quality of the relationship between clinician and patient.
Medical education teaches the knowing and doing of the job: diagnosis, procedure, guideline. It rarely teaches the being of a doctor: how to stay attentive through the fifteenth consultation, decide well under pressure, meet suffering without absorbing it, and keep meaning in the work across a forty-year career.
These are trainable competencies, not personality traits. SCFiM exists to teach them, and to build them into medical education itself, so the next generation doesn't have to learn them the hard way.
Advanced, accredited training in attention, presence, and judgment under pressure.
Developed with practicing physicians and taught by peers who practise medicine themselves: the Mindful Practice curriculum our programs build on was shown, in a trial published in JAMA (Krasner et al., 2009), to reduce burnout and increase empathy in primary-care physicians.
What we do
Three ways we build a more humane medicine
From multi-day programs to curriculum design and research — all aimed at helping clinicians thrive.
Programs
Multi-day, ISFM/SIWF-recognized residential programs for practicing physicians, built around mindful, compassionate practice:
- AIKA — Aufblühen im klinischen Alltag (German)
- PACS — Présence au cœur du soin (French)
Teaching & curriculum
We build these competencies into medical education itself, from a Mind-Body Medicine course for students to reflective practice as part of professional identity — so wellbeing stops depending on individual heroics.
Research
What makes clinicians effective and durable: mindfulness and clinical reasoning, burnout and meaning trajectories in junior doctors, the existential dimensions of medical work, AI and physician identity.
Why this matters now
The will to care is there.
The training isn't.
In a 2025 WHO survey of more than 90,000 health workers across Europe, three in four physicians still described their work as deeply meaningful — while reporting depressive symptoms five times more often than the general population.
Not everyone burns out. Some simply go flat — competent, efficient, respected, and quietly wondering when the work stopped meaning something. That, too, is what this is about.
This is not a fringe problem of the fragile few. It is the predictable result of an education that teaches everything except how to carry the job. And it is a performance problem, not only a personal one: exhausted physicians make more errors, decide less well, and leave the profession earlier.
Fair working conditions are non-negotiable — and they don't relieve us of a second task. Firefighters are trained both to fight fires and to protect themselves; that training is equipment, not weakness. Medicine owes its physicians the same.
3 in 4
find their work deeply meaningful
5x
more depressive symptoms than the general population
1 in 10
have had suicidal thoughts
Source: WHO-Survey of over 90'000 healthcare providers in Europe, 2025.
★ Flourishing in Medicine
Center of Excellence
SCFiM was designated a Flourishing in Medicine Center of Excellence by the University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry, effective February 1, 2025 — recognition shared with centers in Calgary, Kansas City, Melbourne, and Singapore.
Based at the Medical Education Unit, University of Fribourg.
Programs recognized by ISFM, UniFR Continuing Education, and INAMI (Belgium). Designed with feedback from clinicians and taught by peers — from young clinicians to senior faculty.
You don't need to be in crisis to be here.
Most participants aren't. They are committed clinicians who intend to stay that way — some curious, some flat, some tired, some simply here for the credits. All of those are reasons enough.
BEFORE YOU GO
You maintain your knowledge, your skills, your certifications.
Who maintains the physician?
Get involved
Train the part training forgot.
Come for the credits, the colleagues, or the question you've been putting off. Programs run in German (AIKA) and French (PACS); teaching and research collaborations are open year-round. You don't have to be sure — an article, a conversation, a single course day: every door here opens slowly.
