Dentistry | New Acta dean wants faculty to stay independant
With the appointment of Fedde Scheele (64), for the first time in years there is again a permanent dean at ACTA Faculty of Dentistry. Scheele will continue on the path of his predecessor to bring calm and stability to the faculty. If it is up to him, the faculty will remain in its current form for the time being. “That does mean we should not go into the red figures.”
The switch from gynaecology to dentistry is not such a big step as it might seem at first glance, gynaecologist Fedde Scheele tells Folia in his spacious corner office in the Acta building at the VU-campus. “There is definitely common ground. For years an IUD was used in the fallopian tube which became a tragedy due to physical complaints, while in dentistry there were already indications that the same material in braces, for example, caused problems.”
Bucket list
Scheele is also an educator at heart. When he graduated as a gynaecologist, he drew up a bucket list of what needed to be changed within education. Top of the list was communication with the patient, which was virtually absent during his own training.
2015 - 2024 Gynaecologist and dean OLVG, previously at the SLAZ in Amsterdam since 1997
2015 - 2020 President Dutch Association for Medical Education
2004 Professor of Health Systems Innovation and Education at VU University of Amsterdam
1994 PhD in obstetrics and gynaecology at the VU
1996 Graduated as gynaecologist at the VU
During his career as an educator, Scheele worked steadily on the bucket list, which, he said, was finished when he was fifty five. Working at Onze Lieve Vrouwe Gasthuis (OLVG) by then, Scheele had virtually made himself redundant as a supervisor and had largely handed over his beloved cutting work in the operating theatre to the younger staff. He could have “soldiered on” there for many more years, were it not for the fact that his name ended up on the list of potential candidates for the deanship of the dental faculty.
From seventeen sections to four departments
With a lack of candidates within the dental school, Acta also looked outside its own walls for a new dean. That search was difficult in recent years. After Albert Feilzer’s 10-year deanship, Groningen professor of paradontology Frank Abbas temporarily took over as interim dean in 2019. In 2020, American Elsbeth Kalenderian was appointed for five years, but she stepped down within a year of taking office.
After Kalenderian’s departure, interim dean Hans Romijn, former dean of the Faculty of Medicine at the UvA and former chairman of the board of directors of the Amsterdam UMC, came to put things in order. He brought the structure to the organisation that he found lacking on arrival. The dental faculty, which until then had been divided into seventeen separate sections was reduced to four departments.
Scheele will continue that course. “The structure Hans has laid out is basically sacred and makes the job ten times easier for me. From what I read in the paperwork, Hans Romijn should really have a statue here.”
Independent
That Acta has become increasingly similar to Amsterdam UMC in terms of structure does not yet mean that the faculty will be inserted into the Faculty of Medicine in the near future, something that did happen in Nijmegen and Groningen. “I don’t think either party will benefit much from that at the moment. Acta is bigger in education and to an extreme extent bigger in science than Nijmegen and Groningen and that justifies its own faculty for the time being.”
If the faculty is to continue to exist in its current form, it does mean that its finances have to be in order, Scheele adds. “That is a challenge, we have to make great efforts to stay out of the red. Especially now, with the cuts in higher education, funding is going to be cut on all sides, including subsidies.”
Dentist shortage
At the same time, there is a dental shortage in the Netherlands, a problem the government wants to solve by shortening dental education from six to five years. A bad plan, according to Dutch dental administrators. Scheele shares that view. “When you start shortening the training, it comes at the expense of academic training. Then you are going to produce dentists who can become a plaything for the industry. You need those six years to be strong enough to be able to separate the wheat from the chaff.”
Actans
Scheele also wants to continue working on the culture within Acta, the magic word with which the headhunter finally got him into this position. “I really want to start making Acta an inter-professional team, where we will work together as one team within Acta. In my first weeks, I saw that the research is very strong, but organisationally there are still too many islands.”
In addition, Scheele wants students to feel at home at Acta and proud to be Actans, a term he introduced himself. “So proud that they put on the placard of the practive that they trained at Acta.”
Over the next four years, the dental faculty will continue to develop with Scheele at the helm. He will not stay on any longer, when he will be 68. “From the moment I walked in here, I have been scouting who could be the new dean. If all goes well, a young dentist will take over in four years.”
