Neonatologist Marije Hogeveen has been appointed as professor of Choreographing Chaos: The Art and Science of Emergency Teamwork at Radboud university medical center / Radboud University. Her mission is clear: to improve outcomes for critically ill patients by bringing together education, research, and care in the field of emergency care skills — both individual skills and teamwork. Her own background is in neonatology, but her chair reaches further: to every critically ill patient, regardless of age or diagnosis.
In an emergency, healthcare professionals must act quickly and effectively under intense time pressure: what needs to happen, how should it be done, how do you work together, and how do you make sure you can keep doing it? Consider a patient who deteriorates suddenly during a hospital admission. Hogeveen wants to prepare all healthcare professionals better for moments like these. She does so through three pillars.
1. The right preparation
Healthcare professionals need practical skills: how do you resuscitate effectively, how do you assess a patient systematically, and which treatment protocol do you apply? Which skills are crucial is largely known; the real challenge lies in how we teach, assess, and apply them well and consistently.
That is why Hogeveen develops education in the broadest sense: from teaching and assessing skills to applying them in the workplace and embedding them in everyday practice. Together with education specialists, she is building an evidence-based framework that underpins this entire learning cycle.
2. Training together
Good patient care calls not only for individual expertise but also for effective teamwork. Yet professionals who will go on to form a team are often trained separately, learning the same skills in isolation and in different programs. The very people who have to manage a crisis together should also train together.
That is why Hogeveen is building a Radboudumc-wide network focused on the critically ill patient. ‘Many healthcare professionals use the ABCDE approach to recognize and treat life-threatening situations, but in practice its application varies from one department to another — and there is room for improvement', she says. ‘My aim is to teach these skills consistently and to have people practice them together.’ Her conviction is simple: training together means caring better together.
3. Maintaining skills
A skill you learn today is not one you will necessarily still have mastered six months from now. Research consistently shows that critical skills fade — while a course is too often treated as an end point rather than a starting point. ‘That is why it is important to keep actively maintaining both individual and team skills', Hogeveen says. Regular, accessible training and making use of everyday practice opportunities can help. Nationally, she is therefore developing new programs to support this, aimed at both course participants and instructors. Or, as Hogeveen puts it: ‘Keep it up for long enough, and you no longer drop below a minimum level.’
Career
Marije Hogeveen studied medicine at Leiden University and trained as a pediatrician at Radboudumc, followed by fellowships in metabolic diseases and neonatology. She has worked as a neonatologist since 2011. Alongside her clinical work, she developed into an educational leader: she became Principal Lecturer (2018), Associate Professor, and an IAMSE Medical Educator Fellow (2020), and completed her Master’s in Clinical Epidemiology (2024). She is a co-founder of the simulation-based team-training programs NeoSim and ECMOSim and program director of the neonatology fellowship. Internationally, Hogeveen is Science Chair of the European Resuscitation Council’s Newborn Life Support (NLS) group and first author of the 2025 European NLS guideline. She chaired the Dutch national NICU guideline committee (N3) for ten years and is active in various national and international training and guideline bodies. The appointment as professor-leader in education is effective from July 1, for a period of five years.
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