Qualla: Catharina Ziekenhuis

Catharina Ziekenhuis: Introduction

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit avezaat, Public domain. In 2022, a heart surgeon named Ferdi Akca performed a coronary bypass at the Catharina Hospital in Eindhoven without doing the one thing patients and television have always associated with open-heart surgery: he never opened the breastbone with a reciprocating saw. He had watched colleagues do minimally invasive heart-valve replacements during his training and became convinced the same approach could work for bypasses. He was the first heart surgeon in the Netherlands to prove it. Two years later he was teaching the technique to colleagues across the country and abroad. This is the kind of thing the Catharina Hospital does, regularly, with relatively little fanfare.

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Image: avezaat | Public domain

Catharina Ziekenhuis: Seven Sisters from Tilburg

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Rosemoon, CC BY-SA 3.0. The hospital began with a parish-council request in 1843. The Catharina parish in Eindhoven wanted healthcare in the city, and seven sisters from the Sisters of Charity congregation in Tilburg came to set it up. What evolved was the Roman Catholic Inner Hospital, run for decades ...

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Image: Rosemoon | CC BY-SA 3.0

Catharina Ziekenhuis: The Cancer Discovery Hidden in the Fallopian Tube

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Choinowski, CC BY-SA 4.0. In 2004, gynaecological oncologist Jurgen Piek published a finding that has reshaped how the medical world thinks about ovarian cancer. Studying women with a hereditary increased risk, he was the first to demonstrate that the precursor abnormalities were not in the ovaries at all...

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Image: Choinowski | CC BY-SA 4.0

Catharina Ziekenhuis: The Angioplasty Adjustment That Crossed the Ocean

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Choinowski, CC BY-SA 4.0. In 2009 the Catharina Hospital was the driving force behind a small but worldwide change in angioplasty. Two of its cardiologists, Pim Tonino and Nico Pijls, led an international study involving one thousand heart patients across twenty hospitals in Europe and the United States. ...

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Image: Choinowski | CC BY-SA 4.0

Catharina Ziekenhuis: The Largest Heart Center in the Country

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Lonenlau, CC BY-SA 4.0. Catharina is one of only eight non-university hospitals in the Netherlands authorised to perform open-heart surgery. Its cardiovascular department is the largest of its kind in the country, and its Catharina Cancer Institute, complete with radiotherapy, is the other supraregional...

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Image: Lonenlau | CC BY-SA 4.0

Catharina Ziekenhuis: Hospitals That Watch You at Home

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Choinowski, CC BY-SA 4.0. In 2023 the Catharina launched a home monitoring centre, where specialist nurses watch patient data in real time through screens and headsets while the patient stays on their couch with a phone or tablet. The supported pathways are unglamorous and useful: COPD, COVID, influenza, ...

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Image: Choinowski | CC BY-SA 4.0