Catharina Ziekenhuis

Catharina Ziekenhuis (English: Catharina Hospital) is the largest general hospital in Eindhoven. It is located on Michelangelolaan in Woensel. The Catharina Hospital is a top clinical and top referral teaching hospital. Due to the lack of an academic hospital within a short distance, it provides highly specialized care at an academic level. Its supraregional focal points are oncology (with the Catharina Cancer Institute, including a radiotherapy department) and cardiovascular diseases (with the largest heart and vascular center in the Netherlands).

It is one of the eight non-university hospitals authorized for open-heart surgery. As a training center for doctors and nurses, it has close ties with Maastricht University Medical Center Plus (Maastricht UMC+) and Eindhoven University of Technology. As a result of this collaboration, 19 professors are employed at the hospital, including Lukas Dekker, Volkher Scharnhorst, Ignace de Hingh, Chairman of the Board Nardo van der Meer, Huib van Vliet, Misha Luyer, and Pim Tonino.

The Catharina Hospital is also a member of Santeon, a collaborative group of seven major top clinical hospitals in the Netherlands, focused on quality improvement and innovation.

History
In 1843, at the request of the parish council of the Catharina parish in Eindhoven, seven religious sisters from the Sisters of Charity congregation in Tilburg came to Eindhoven to establish healthcare services. Over the years, this evolved into the Roman Catholic Inner Hospital. For many years, it was located on Vestdijk in the city center, where the Heuvel Galerie now stands.

By the early 1960s, this hospital was outdated and too small. In the summer of 1968, preparations began for new construction on Michelangelolaan in Woensel. The building was completed in the summer of 1973. During the same period, the hospital was negatively in the news due to disagreements within the thoracic surgery department about the performance of one of the heart surgeons. The move to the new building was used as an opportunity to change the name to Catharina Hospital.

Name
The hospital is named after Saint Catherine of Alexandria, the namesake of the Catharina Church from which the initiative to establish the hospital originated. In the Roman Catholic tradition, Catherine is considered the patron saint of hospitals.

Further Notables
Gynecological oncologist Jurgen Piek was the first in the world, in 2004, to show that abnormalities indicating precursors of cancer in women with a hereditary increased risk of ovarian cancer are not found in the ovary but in the fallopian tubes. Later research by other groups worldwide showed the same and suggested that for non-hereditary forms of ovarian cancer, the fallopian tube is the cause in at least 60% of cases.

In 2009, the Catharina Hospital was the basis for a small yet significant adjustment to the angioplasty technique, leading to a drastic worldwide reduction in the number of deaths after an angioplasty. This change came from an international study led by two cardiologists from the Catharina Hospital: Pim Tonino and Nico Pijls. The study involved a thousand heart patients from twenty hospitals in Europe and the United States. The results were prioritized for publication by the renowned medical journal The New England Journal of Medicine.

In 2022, Ferdi Akca became the first heart surgeon in the Netherlands to perform a bypass operation without opening the breastbone with a jigsaw. During his training, he saw colleagues successfully use endoscopic surgery to replace a heart valve and became convinced that it could also be used for bypass operations. In 2024, he aims to pass on this knowledge to colleagues both domestically and internationally.

In 2022, the Catharina Hospital launched Value-Driven Care, a program based on Value-Based Health Care principles. For several conditions, the hospital works out the most important information on care outcomes, care costs, and the quality of the care process. A continuous improvement cycle is established for each condition. In 2022, the first 13 conditions were selected, and a year later, it was expanded to 20, mainly concerning cardiological and oncological conditions. Maternity care and extreme obesity were also selected.

In January 2023, medical engineer Nienke Bakx was named one of the fifteen greatest promises of the moment by the magazine De Ingenieur. Bakx developed an algorithm at Eindhoven University of Technology for the Catharina Cancer Institute that assists in creating treatment plans for breast cancer patients, significantly increasing efficiency.

In September 2023, the American news magazine Newsweek ranked the Catharina Hospital 227th on the list of World's Best Smart Hospitals 2024. This list includes 330 hospitals from 28 countries excelling in the use of electronic functionalities, such as remote care, digital imaging, and the use of AI and robotics. The top 10 mainly consists of American hospitals. The number of Dutch entries is steadily increasing. In 2021, there were five; now, there are nine.

In 2023, the Catharina Hospital started a home monitoring center. Home monitoring involves measuring values (e.g., blood sugar or blood pressure) at home via an app on your mobile or tablet and entering them. In the Monitoring Center, specialized monitoring nurses track recovery in real time via screens and headsets and provide advice as needed. The benefit is that patients need to visit the hospital less often for routine check-ups. The Monitoring Center of the Catharina Hospital supports six care pathways: COPD, COVID-19, influenza, gestational diabetes, heart failure, and post-stroke patient care.

The Catharina Hospital collaborates closely with other healthcare institutions, including Bernhoven Hospital in Uden, Anna Hospital in Geldrop, and Trauma Center Brabant in Tilburg. Since 2024, the heart surgeons of the Catharina Hospital have been assisting the trauma surgeons of the Elisabeth-TweeSteden Hospital (ETZ) when a patient has, for instance, a stab or gunshot wound in the heart region.

The Catharina Hospital also has a research fund, the Catharina Research Fund, which is dedicated to financing scientific research within the hospital. The Catharina does this because it does not receive government funding for scientific research; only academic hospitals receive such funding. As a top clinical hospital, the Catharina must seek other funding sources for research.