‘The valorisation and implementation of cardiovascular research are still quite a challenge’

The Dutch Heart Foundation is the most important financing partner within the Dutch cardiovascular field. According to Managing Director Hans Snijder, the Foundation depends entirely on gifts and donations, which means they must be able to properly justify their expenses to donors. The Foundation’s top priorities are early detection, diversity and creating a healthy environment.

As the managing director, Snijder emphasises that he’s not a cardiologist or researcher and that the Foundation also doesn’t organise conferences. 

Even when the world’s largest conference of cardiology professionals, the annual conference of the European Society of Cardiology, visited Amsterdam again last year, the Dutch Heart Foundation did not play an organising role, but it did host a partnership of comparable international foundations in the slipstream.

However, the Foundation’s logo could be seen in many places during the conference. The results of Dutch research that were presented were often financed, or at least co-financed, by the Dutch Heart Foundation.

Cardiovascular field

“In the Dutch cardiovascular field, we’re talking about 24 involved partners who are also part of the Dutch CardioVascular Alliance, the DCVA,” Snijder explains. “We’re the most important driving force within this network organisation. We support individual research projects, which are increasingly carried out in consortia in which several partners collaborate. Other research funders are also involved, such as ZonMw (Netherlands Organisation for Health Research and Development) and NWO (Dutch Research Council).”

Seven top priorities

The Dutch Heart Foundation has established seven top priorities as pillars of its new Heart and Vascular Agenda, which is part of its strategy to measurably improve heart health by 2030. “It’s a necessity, knowing that six out of ten hospital admissions are related to cardiovascular disease. There are currently 1.7 million Dutch people, or about 10 percent of the population, with cardiovascular disease. If we don’t take action, this number is expected to rise to one million more in ten years. With these kinds of figures, you sometimes forget what personal suffering lies behind these enormous numbers. That’s close to our hearts,” says Snijder.

“Researchers and scientists now agree that three of those six hospital admissions can be prevented or postponed by creating an environment in which healthy living is easy,” Snijder adds. “To put it bluntly, we eat and drink too much, and we don’t exercise enough. This makes prevention a top priority, and it’s important that you not only look at the individual but also at the influence of the environment.”

“The price and availability policy of smoking, the number one cause of death related to cardiovascular problems, is a good example of this. Increasing the price and decreasing availability have been effective in reducing smoking. We’re working on this together with the Lungfonds and the KWF Dutch Cancer Society. On April 1, the price of a pack of cigarettes increased significantly again, with cigarettes no longer being sold in supermarkets.”

Warn faster 

Another priority is to warn faster. “Since it’s also crucial to discover cardiovascular problems in time, a lot of the research is increasingly aimed at preventing the worse.”

According to Snijder, diversity is another pillar on the agenda. “In cardiovascular diseases, we are increasingly taking into account differences between people, between men and women, rich and poor, and the fact that we’re dealing with a society that we now call bi-cultural.”

The next step is a custom treatment. “The development is towards personalised medicine, and a lot of research still needs to be done,” says Snijder.

Heart failure is underestimated

A condition that has additional priority in research is heart failure, in which the heart cannot pump enough blood and results in serious complaints such as shortness of breath and fatigue. Some 500,000 people in the Netherlands suffer from some form of heart failure, which is a fatal disease. Half of people die within five years of the first hospital admission due to heart failure.

“It’s an underestimated problem, and that means that tackling heart failure is a high priority for us,” explains Snijder. 

And last but not least, the Dutch Heart Foundation faces the daunting task of putting the results of all the high-quality research carried out in the Netherlands into practice. “It’s absolutely one of our priorities that the results of cardiovascular research reach patients. The valorisation and its implementation are still quite a challenge,” Snijder emphasises.

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Dutch CardioVascular Alliance

Supporters of the Dutch cardiovascular field work together through the Dutch CardioVascular Alliance (DCVA). The Dutch Heart Foundation is one of the 24 partners. The collaborating partners create consortiums based on the alliance’s priority points of interest.

A DCVA consortium is characterised by a collaboration between several research institutes and public and private organisations that create a national network around a specific cardiovascular theme. At least one of the consortium partners is the alliance’s formal financial partner. The consortium actively contributes to the alliance in terms of allocating time and efforts to valorisation, implementation, talent development, and data infrastructure.

Examples of consortia are Check@Home, Big Data & Health, Clinical Trails and Covid-19 Initiatives.

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The Foundation’s guiding role

Working groups have been created around the above-mentioned themes, which include doctors, scientists, policymakers, and patients. “You could say that the Dutch Heart Foundation has a guiding role in contributing to what our mission is in the cardiovascular world, namely a healthy heart for everyone, now and in the future.”

Although the Dutch Heart Foundation’s focus is on the Netherlands, it is also part of two international partnerships. There is the Global Cardiovascular Research Funders Forum (GCRFF), a partnership of 12 major international funders of cardiovascular research. And then there is the European Heart Network (EHN), of which Snijder is a board member. In addition, research is initiated jointly with institutions such as the British Heart Foundation or Germany’s DZHK.

Supported by donors

As Snijder points out, the Dutch Heart Foundation does not organise conferences or profile itself doing so. Apart from the fact that there are organisations that are already doing this well, this also results from the financing of the Dutch Heart Foundation itself, he says. All income consists of gifts and donations.

“Honestly, we’re not the collection vehicle of the cardiology community. We’re a social health fund. I must be able to justify every euro we spend. Promoting ourselves on a large international stage, such as the ESC Congress, for example, does not fit our profile. It’s not us, but the researchers and cardiologists who are in the spotlight, who present their research that could not have taken place if they were not supported by a consortium or a grant from the Dutch Heart Foundation.”

Talented researchers

“We prefer to put our donors’ money into research. It often involves real, innovative research. And every year we award Dekker grants to young researchers to give their ground-breaking research a big push.”

This year, 14 talented researchers received Dekker grants for their promising cardiovascular disease research. To date, a total of 5.6 million euros has been awarded. “For [n3] many years now, we’ve also been inviting the larger financing partners of the Dekker grants to the awards meeting. And it turns out that these capital funds, private individuals and companies really appreciate that we give them the opportunity to get in touch with the researchers. This way, they really get a feel for the people working on the research,” Snijder explains.

Broader profile

The activities that the Dutch Heart Foundation organises are aimed at the population. “It’s important for us to profile ourselves more broadly. For example, it’s not easy for many agencies to make contact with socially difficult neighbourhoods in the Netherlands. We’re working on this in two ways. We did a campaign around Ramadan with influencers from the younger generation, who are part of this culture. What are good recipes? What should you think about in terms of nutrition when Ramadan starts? That campaign had a wide reach in that niche, because that’s how you have to approach it.

The same applies to our collaboration with the Nouri Foundation (on behalf of the Ajax footballer who suffered cardiac arrest at a young age). Together with the Nouri Foundation, we ensure that in every city where there’s a professional football organisation, AEDs are also installed in the more problematic neighbourhoods. We also combine this with resuscitation training.”

Six-minute zones

Something remarkable was accomplished with the AEDs, due to the Dutch Heart Foundation’s efforts and donations. The Netherlands is the only country in the world to have an infrastructure that is called ‘the six-minute zone’. “You could say that there’s a defibrillator on almost every street corner. And around it, there’s a very fine-meshed network of citizen care providers. If you were to suffer a cardiac arrest in the Netherlands, you can in principle get help within six minutes,” says Snijder.

 

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Hans Snijder, 60, has been active in the Dutch broadcasting landscape for a large part of his career, where he worked for NOS, VARA and NTR. He has also served as chairman of the supervisory board of broadcaster AvroTros.

From 2009 to 2017, he was Editor-in-chief of the Leeuwarden Courant, which was honoured with a number of European Newspaper Awards during that period. And as interim managing director, he was involved in the transformation into the NDC Media Group. In 2017, he entered the medical sector as Director of Media & Communications at the Princess Máxima Center for Pediatric Oncology. Five years later, he became the new Managing Director of the Dutch Heart Foundation. In this position, he sits on the supervisory board of the Dutch CardioVascular Alliance and is a board member of the European Heart Network (EHN).

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‘Conferences should distract you for a while’

This year, exceptionally, the Dutch Heart Foundation is organising a conference. This summer, it will receive fellow members of the European Heart Network in Amsterdam. Then about 50 people from around the world who are involved in similar organisations to the Dutch Heart Foundation will come together.

Snijder believes that it is important that the conference get people out of their daily work and thought patterns. “There must also be room for personal stories. For example, we have a highly regarded cardiologist on the programme who was a heart patient himself and talks about it. We have a number of break-out sessions in which you discuss with each other in smaller groups. And we do speed dating sessions where you can quickly exchange information about your specialty and what projects you’re working on.”

I also asked a leading journalist to outline the European setting, as the congress takes place on the eve of the European elections.

It’s important that you get out of your own bubble for a while, which is my view on conferences. You need to be distracted for a while by taking note of perspectives that are less common in your daily work.”

 

This article was published in Conference Matters international 142, May 2024