Dirk De Ridder

Dirk De Ridder is Professor of Urology at the Katholieke Universtiteit Leuven, Belgium. From 2015 to 2020, he chaired the Department of Urology at KU University Hospitals Leuven. Since 2020, he has been Director of Quality at KU Leuven University Hospitals and a member of the Executive Committee. He received his medical degree in 1989, became a board-certified urologist in 1995, and completed a doctoral dissertation on urological care for patients with multiple sclerosis in 1998. He has been a staff member of KU Leuven University Hospitals since 1995. He is a Fellow of the European Board of Urology. Since 2013, he has been the Strategic Director of the Flemish Hospital Network KU Leuven (VznkuL), a quality improvement association of 32 hospitals, collaborating with the University Hospitals KU Leuven. He also is the President of the Leuven Institute for Health Policy since 2013. In this position, he contributed to Flemish health policy by drafting government reports on ‘The Hospital of the Future’ and ‘Strategic Care Planning in Hospital Networks in Flanders’ and the new ‘Flanders Quality Model’, a hospital quality management model implemented in 25 Flemish hospitals. More recently he supervised several PhD researchers focussing on the use of administrative data for Quality assessment and improvement in hospitals. He is Chairman of the Board of Directors of the National Centre for Multiple Sclerosis, Melsbroek, Belgium and is a member of the Board of Directors of St. Blasius Hospital, Dendermonde, Belgium.