The fact that Kuipers comes from outside the Hague dome does not necessarily make him suitable

D66 promised new administrative impetus. The party came up with administrators from outside the Hague, including physicist Robbert Dijkgraaf and medical specialist Ernst Kuipers. The former will be Minister of Education, Culture and Science, the latter of Health, Welfare and Sport.

Sounds logical and refreshing. Finally, the boss of VWS has actually treated a patient, negotiated with a health insurer, felt the reality of labor shortages, experienced the patient tsunami from the receiving end. But who knows the ideology of Ernst Kuipers? Public health is currently responsible for the greatest curtailment of freedom of movement, social redevelopment, physical integrity and civil rights in this country. Has anyone been able to distil anything from Kuipers’ many media appearances that resembles the beginning of a position on this balancing of social interests? Will he become the value-free executor of the pressure jab that the liberals of D66 propagate?

What is Kuipers’ view on the biggest bottleneck in healthcare: the fact that no one is willing to work in hospitals anymore and the people who are willing can only last a few years at most?

Kuipers is the man of efficiency; care must above all be centralized and specialised, performing the same trick more often means cheaper and better. In the performance, the patient is reduced to a bag of organs with a defect as quickly as possible, and based on the diagnosis, he is dragged around the country until he may no longer know where he is and the medical team does not know who he is but only but what’s wrong and how to fix it. And then they can. Very well in fact. Because they do it ten times, day in, day out, super efficiently and safely and cheaply. Shipping label on it and return it, or on to the next workshop for the next defect.

My question to Kuipers is: will anyone even want to work in healthcare in the future?

Your child may be under the same pediatric cardiologist for years, but when the time comes for surgery, he’s reduced to an anonymous boy sent to a mega-medical complex 100 miles away. Because that’s efficient.

Even more questions: at a time when ‘steering in the ICUs’ has turned out to be so disastrous, is it wise to put someone who has spent his entire career in hospitals in charge of Dutch health, while the biggest issues are mainly outside the are in hospital? Does the hospital man feel like restoring the intricate networks in the neighborhoods and the expertise of public health? The cutbacks in school doctors, infectious disease prevention, GGD doctors that can come in handy in the rare event that a pandemic breaks out?

What does Kuipers think about the Society & Health specialism, which usually dangles at the bottom of the hierarchy of medicine? Is that worth reinvesting or is it not running enough production?

Also read: Does Kuipers dare to fight a central pandemic?

I have exactly the same doubts about Robbert Dijkgraaf. He spent a professional life among the geniuses of the world who attended elite schools Princeton, Stanford, MIT. His specialty is the crème de la crème and they drown in money. Does Dijkgraaf have an eye for the Dutch scientists whose researches consistently lose out in an agenda full of education and grant applications? Is the education that Dijkgraaf brought to great heights the solution for everyone, or do some people just have to leave school and go to work as soon as possible?

And I also want to know from Dijkgraaf what his brilliant plan is to keep schools attractive for teachers. Can Dijkgraaf and Kuipers put themselves in the shoes of an ‘ordinary’ teacher or nurse who may not have the same boundless love for the profession?

We sometimes speak of shame when ministers, after their departure from The Hague, start working in the field for which they previously assumed official responsibility. I don’t know why it suddenly works the other way around.

Rosanne Hertzberger is a microbiologist.

A version of this article also appeared in NRC Handelsblad on 8 January 2022 A version of this article also appeared in NRC in the morning of 8 January 2022

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