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Focusing on prevention and vitality

Nice to meet you: Veerle van Zelst-de Vries

At the Faculty of Health, Medicine and Life Sciences, staff and students strive to make a difference. For instance, Emma focuses on sex and gender in research, and Dominik is measuring digital pulses. In 'Nice to meet you' these individuals introduce themselves and share their work within FHML.

Veerle van Zelst-de Vries is programme director Prevention and Vitality at Maastricht UMC+. This programme positions prevention and vitality within Maastricht UMC+, meaning FHML and the hospital together. The aim is to create societal impact in Limburg and beyond. Veerle: "Prevention is not a magic word, but I believe it can make a significant contribution to a healthier society.”

Veerle’s background is in nursing and business administration. “I really like strategy: looking at where we are heading together and how I can contribute to that,” says Veerle. Before she started working as programme director, she was a business manager at the Woman, Mother, and Child Centre and the Centre for Movement at Maastricht UMC+.

Joint effort

With these two centres, the Maastricht Comprehensive Cancer Centre and the Centre for Chronic Illness,, she established a vitality desk for patients in 2022, linked to research from GROW and CAPHRI. “It went really well, and we received increasing inquiries from the region about our activities related to prevention,” says Veerle. “We were primarily focused on patients, but the questions we received were much broader. However, there was no one within Maastricht UMC+ to refer these questions to. Therefore, my colleagues and I were asked to create a plan to map out activities and initiatives related to prevention and vitality within Maastricht UMC+. After this analysis, I was asked to lead this programme. I was enthusiastic, but I had one important condition: it had to be a joint effort from Maastricht UMC+, meaning the faculty and the hospital together, as we hold the collective knowledge of prevention together. Once that was arranged, we found a location and recruited the team. We have now been operating at full strength for several months.”

We have the knowledge and expertise, and now we are going to use it to create even more societal impact.

Knowledge and expertise

According to Veerle, Maastricht UMC+ is already a knowledge and expertise centre in the field of prevention and vitality, but the organisation wants to take it a step further. “We have three core functions: connecting, advising, and driving change,” she explains. “We connect people internally, for instance a healthcare professional to a researcher, or externally, for instance a societal partner to a researcher. We also advise organisations on how to translate scientific knowledge into practical applications, for example by organising workshops. Driving change is about realising maximum impact, by getting important subjects on the political agenda in The Hague.”

There is a clear regional reason for this programme. “Of all the Dutch provinces, Limburg scores the lowest on 'self-reported health' - how healthy people feel,” says Veerle. “On the number of chronic diseases per individual, we score very high. We want to contribute to changing that. We have the knowledge and expertise, and now we are going to use it to create even more societal impact.”

Magic word

What appealed to Veerle about this programme is that there was a lot of freedom. “With the elaboration of the Prevention theme in the Maastricht UMC+ strategy ‘Healthy Living’, a solid foundation was already in place,” she says. “Our team was given a lot of freedom to build the programme on that. The entrepreneurial aspect suits me as a person, I really enjoy it. I am also very drawn to the theme of prevention and vitality. We always say we work in healthcare, but we are actually mostly focused on illness. Although that is good, I believe many problems can be solved by focusing on health: preventing illness. Prevention is not a magic word, but I do think it can make a very important contribution to our society.”

Success

When will the programme be a success for Veerle? “When we are recognised as an important partner in our region for prevention and vitality, and our knowledge is applied in society, I will be very happy,” she says. “Additionally, there is no sustainable funding for prevention initiatives yet. There are many different funds, but we have only one mission: a healthy society. An integrated approach to healthcare is still missing, but it would be a great success if we can achieve that. Right now, it is a very fragmented landscape, and you can feel that real ‘integral’ change is slow to take off."

 

Text: Joëlle van Wissen
Photo: Alf Mertens

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