A healthy hospital in a healthy university

UZ Leuven is not only the beating heart of healthcare in our region and far beyond, but also an essential part of KU Leuven. With its size and expertise, the hospital plays an important role in the university community. The new policy plan 2025-2030 of UZ Leuven aspires to be an Agile and Connecting UZ to maintain its leading position in the Flemish and also the European landscape. The three pillars of the 2025-2030 policy plan include subsidiarity, whereby responsibility and accountability are placed in the right place, as close as possible to those involved, innovation and embedding in regional and supra-regional networks. To further develop UZ Leuven’s leading position, cooperation and mutual reinforcement between the university and the hospital are needed.

UZ Leuven consists of several campuses, each with its own expertise: Gasthuisberg campus for acute care, Pellenberg campus for rehabilitation and the city campus for dentistry and oral-maxillofacial surgery. Together, they form a unique cluster of research, education and care.  In addition, the University Psychiatric Centre (UPC) plays a pioneering role in mental health care.

At European level, UZ Leuven is the second largest academic hospital, with 8,521 FTE (10,001 employees) in which 62 nationalities are represented. With this team, we perform 15 million laboratory tests every year, more than 700,000 consultations, receive more than 70,000 people in the emergency department, organise more than 50,000 hospital admissions and perform almost 60,000 surgical procedures. Even more important for UZ Leuven is our leading position in organ transplantation, care for patients with rare diseases and specialised oncology programmes.  Innovation is central to this and clinical and translational research is therefore essential to continue playing that leading role, especially at European level. We are currently number one in Europe for clinical trials per capita and second worldwide, and have world-leading research groups in many disciplines that contribute to innovative medical care.

Despite impressive achievements, researchers and collaborators today experience that scientific research on humans or human material is becoming very difficult to sometimes impossible, due to excessively stringent European regulations, national legislation, increasing administrative burdens and burdensome and delaying processes around legal, financial and ethical approval. This is perceived as a major pain point by a lot of researchers. Continuity of collections in biobanks is a concern and continued investment in them is crucial for future research.  We will address the efficiency of these processes in the coming policy period.

1. The basic idea should be to provide maximum support to our researchers for their clinical trials, instead of seeking to control them. In the processes and flows for studies, it should be clear that the clinical trial centre (CTC) should take up its service and support role in an efficient manner . Also, through optimal coordination and integration with the other support services, the Biobank and the respective Ethics Committees, approval processes should become more efficient, flexible, transparent and, above all, faster. This for both commercial (contract research) and academic studies. The latter generate less financial resources for the hospital, the university and the researcher, but are absolutely indispensable as breeding grounds and incubators for further research. Moreover, they give by far the greatest satisfaction to our staff. In addition, academic research forms the backbone of many master’s theses and doctoral projects. If we ask researchers to make a big effort for this, it is only fair that they can count on an efficiently functioning and facilitating system for this, without frustrating delays and obstacles.
2. We are strongly committed to clear guidelines and secure infrastructure for the legal, ethical and technically accessible use and reuse of health data for scientific research. The same applies to improving quality within care and safety of our operations. UZ Leuven has many sources of health data, stored in the digital patient file, the clinical workstation (KWS) but also in other locations (secure registers at researchers). This software for the KWS was developed by UZ Leuven and is now owned by Nexuzhealth. There is frustration about the use (or rather, not being able to use) of data from the KWS, due to technical, legal and ethical reasons. Following the very recently implemented European Health Data Space (EHDS) Regulation (5 March 2025), we are making the transition to secure, reliable and responsible (re)use of electronic health data for research, innovations and decisions in our organisation. To this end, we cooperate with the federal Health Data Agency (HDA) and other relevant agencies. We participate in data platforms formed by consortia of hospitals such as Levilo Health, Federated Health Innovation Network (FHIN), and groups of healthcare facilities in Flanders that have the ambition to harmonise, standardise and make their data available according to the prevailing ethical principles and with a guarantee that each hospital retains full control over its data. The Observational Medical Outcomes Partnership (OMOP) data model and FHIR stores guarantee standardisation of data and storage to enable comparisons and collaborations between hospitals, to optimise care, organise prevention, enable early detection of syndromes, guarantee safety and improve clinical decisions. All this should contribute to excellent care and research at UZ Leuven.
3. Clinical department heads should be given a framework to align the clinical and academic time commitment of their clinical ZAP so that the 30% academic time, as calculated by the allocation model, can be safeguarded. The engagement measurement among the doctors and an analysis by the internal audit committee have made it clear that fulfilling the three-pronged mission is not a given for the clinical ZAP for whom clinical duties often take the upper hand at the expense of their teaching and research. It is the role of the head of department to ensure that there is a proper balance within the department for each individual staff member between clinical work and time for teaching and research. We recognise that differences may remain between clinical services, although the target figure of 30% academic time should be pursued. Clinical ZAP who bring in a funded mandate from the Clinical Research and Training Council (KOOR), the Fund for Scientific Research (FWO) or BOF-FKO should be given real time off for the time the mandate provides. To implement this, it is necessary to make both clinical and academic expectations explicit at the service level. We see this as a core task of the clinical service head as integrator.  If output (both clinical and academic) falls below expectations, the time allocation should be adjusted.
4. We must strategically cooperate and coordinate with regional and supra-regional networks to safeguard UZ Leuven’s leading role as a university hospital. UZ Leuven’s position is challenged by a strongly changing hospital landscape. For example, we are facing a wave of consolidation, leading to the formation of a number of large merger hospitals and highly integrated hospital networks spread across the Flemish landscape. This consolidation gives these players the scale to invest in expensive and complex treatment modalities. This allows them to offer highly specialised care to patients, but also to recruit doctors with academic interests, who previously could only treat such complex pathologies in university hospitals. This complicates the recruitment and retention of doctor-specialists at UZ Leuven, especially for specialisms where the salaried status of UZ Leuven does not outweigh the financial incentive experienced by independent colleagues. By cooperating strategically within the new hospital landscape, we transform these challenges into opportunities. We must continue to pay attention to the status of the permanent medical staff (VMS) UZ Leuven in order to remain competitive with the large peripheral centres.
5. Together with our partners in Plexus, the regional hospital network in East Flemish Brabant, our core mission is to provide quality care as close as possible to where patients live. Important challenges are the limited scale of the regional hospitals in the network and the capacity limitation at UZ Leuven, the different mission of the three regional hospitals compared to UZ Leuven, and differences in statutes. Further integration is therefore necessary but equally challenging. This integration offers important opportunities such as capacity expansion within the locoregional network so that sufficient space is safeguarded for our tertiary pathology at UZ Leuven. Cooperation is the way forward, for both UZ Leuven and our surrounding locoregional hospitals. We are transparent about how efforts and resources can benefit doctors.
6. Regarding a potential joint master’s in medicine at Hasselt University, it is crucial that KU Leuven makes good agreements on the quality of this programme. This will be done openly and based on international standards. Hasselt University has a preliminary agreement with KU Leuven to jointly develop this master’s degree. However, Hasselt University has not yet been granted decretal teaching competence for this master’s degree.  If this competence is granted, we will examine, on the basis of the preliminary agreement with Hasselt University, how we can organise an evidence-based master’s programme with concrete translation of scientific insights into practice, so that our university also benefits. After all, we must avoid fragmentation and extra workload at all times. Additional resources will therefore be a central requirement, including for the assignments that will be delivered by KU Leuven to the new joint programme. We are confident that this is indeed possible. After all, we also have excellent cooperation with Hasselt University in other fields.
7. Nurses and other crucial staff at UZ Leuven and KU Leuven have to cope with housing and mobility issues. We must provide effective, structural and sustainable solutions in consultation with the government and the city of Leuven. The structural shortage of healthcare providers is the biggest challenge for healthcare in the next decade and is already leading to an underutilisation of capacity on campus Gasthuisberg. The sky-high real estate prices in the Leuven region make it very difficult for many employees to rent or buy affordable housing in the reasonable vicinity of Leuven. For those who live further away, smooth mobility is hampered by traffic congestion and insufficient expansion of public transport. We must work together with the city of Leuven and the surrounding municipalities to provide affordable housing.
8. We are further strengthening the embedding of UPC KU Leuven. Mental healthcare requires strong anchoring within the broader UZ Leuven network and within the university. Mental healthcare is important for the entire university and also offers opportunities for interfaculty and interdisciplinary research. We will also use all the expertise within UPC and Z.Org but also the Faculty of Psychological and Educational Sciences to see how we can expand counselling within our organisation given the high need for psychosocial support. By making UPC and Z.Org more visible within the university and hospital structure, we will improve collaboration and increase impact in this vital area for our students and staff.
9. We pursue a policy of sustainable employee engagement. UZ Leuven has more than 10,000 employees, 3 out of 4 of whom are women. We work on a healthy workload, career perspectives for and diversity among all these employees. Our employees are passionate about serving patients and supporting clinical research. An ageing population and more complex care demands are increasing the pressure on our hospitals and employees. We are additionally focusing on increasing well-being and developing initiatives to reduce the workload.  Here, we are thinking of flexible working hours, better career development and a stronger diversity policy. We will also implement technological innovations such as sensor technology and AI to give healthcare providers more time for their core tasks again. The Leuven ecosystem including the S&T and Human Sciences groups and Imec offer unique opportunities here.