John van den Dobbelsteen appointed professor of Medical Process Engineering

John van den Dobbelsteen has been appointed professor of Medical Process Engineering at TU Delft. He focuses his research on improving the interaction between operating personnel and medical technology. In doing so, he focuses his attention primarily on alleviating all kinds of hiccups in the work processes within the entire surgical process, from the preparation of operations to the handling.

Van den Dobbelsteen is a consortium member of the Medical Delta NIMIT and Medical Delta Institute of Fetal & Neonatal Care scientific programs. He is also one of the initiators of the Medical Delta Living Lab ResearchOR.

Due to technological developments, hospitals are gaining more and more medical technology. Healthcare personnel are not trained for this. As a result, surgical staff must invest too much time in understanding and applying technological equipment while their focus and attention should be on the patient. This in turn creates various risks through misuse of the technology but at the same time also creates many inefficiencies.

"Where you used to operate with just a scalpel and some operating assistants, so to speak, you now have to make sure that all, often complex, technological equipment is prepared in the right way and at the right time before you can safely perform such an operation. Such operations take knowledge and time. In fact, there are constantly people planning and managing all this medical technology that basically have nothing to do with the main purpose: the clinical task. This results in wasted time, excessive costs, long waiting lists, operations that run out, making care unsustainable in the long run.''