Face of Flanders: Yvo Nuyens

Nuyens’ name is regularly coupled with the word “flamboyant” thanks to his colourful style and his use of comedy in the lecture hall. He had been made a professor at the age of only 29, which helped him, he said in an interview in 2008, not to take himself too seriously.

“I’m not the Oracle of Delphi, you know,” he said. “Humour was my survival mechanism, for example, when I was catapulted into a professorship in my 20s and thrown into an auditorium – let’s call it a lions’ den – in front of a thousand students, most of whom were hardly five years younger than me. I used simple tricks: pink socks, standing on top of the lectern, jokes about Limburgers. I still come across students from those times today, and they all remember those amusing details.”

Far from being a clown, however, Nuyens’ experience travelling the world to study health-care systems for WHO made him an informed critic, and he remained a critic back home. In 2013 he published, with journalist and politician Hugo De Ridder, the book Dokter, ik heb ook iets te zeggen (Doctor, I Also Have Something to Say) about the way patients were treated by the health-care system, in particular by hospital doctors.

That led to the creation of the Kievit Group, a think-tank of health-care experts devoted to bringing about changes in the system. Nuyens, by now returned to live in Belgium after his years with WHO, was a key adviser to Flemish welfare minister Jo Vandeurzen – who happens to be a Limburger.

“According to several studies, Belgians should be happy with their health care,” Nuyens said in another interview last year. “But that sometimes has more to do with the questions asked than with the reality. Take, for instance, the growing social health gap. People who are less educated are not only more often sick, they also have a lower life expectancy. That’s a scandal for our welfare system.”

Photo Rob Stevens/KULeuven