COURTESY ALEXANDER MONRO HOSPITAL GOODWILL HOW SPECIALISATION SAVES LIVES The first specialised hospital for breast cancer, The Alexander Monro hospital, in Bilthoven, Utrecht, is aiming to spread its model across the globe // By Claire Wrathall “WORKING AS AN ONCOLOGIC surgeon in a big hospital in the Netherlands, I saw a lot of good things,” says Marjolein de Jong, also the founder of the Breast Care Foundation and Breast Care The Netherlands, a group for founding specialised breast cancer hospitals. “But every day I also witnessed so many inefficiencies and conflicts of interest that it seemed to me we were just not able to do our best because the logistics of running a hospital and having to share facilities were working against us.” What, she wondered, if instead of one huge institution striving to treat all diseases, there were instead small, specialised centres of excellence that focused exclusively on just one condition, run on a human scale, where the care was not just clinical but compassionate and took account of all the many different anxieties brought by a life-changing diagnosis. “We always say the medical team are experts in their specialty, but the patients are specialists in their own lives,” she says. And yet so often their feelings and personal circumstances are overlooked. How much better to take a holistic approach, and “combine the two” in an ethos she describes as “caring and curing”. MISSION STATEMENT Marjolein de Jong combines caring and curing at the Alexander Monro Hospital 10 NetJets
