Kjeld Aij

Kjeld Aij is a business administrator and registered nurse with an MBA and over fifteen years of experience in the health care industry. He worked as the head of Anesthesiology & Operative Care at the VU University Medical Center from 2010 to mid-2015. In April 2015, he became the Director of Business Administration for the Acute Care Division at VUmc (1,000 FTE). Kjeld has implemented various projects in the areas of quality and patient safety and spearheaded, among other projects, the introduction of lean thinking and lean processes in the operating rooms. Kjeld has previously conducted research into leadership and successful change in organizations, with a special focus on the role of middle management. Since 2010, he has served as a member of the project committee for the Dutch Operating Room Benchmarking Collaborative, whose objective is to improve operating room performance through mutual learning from best practices. In 2010, he was appointed as a research member of the Lean Healthcare Research Consortium of Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, USA. Since 2013, he has also been a member of the Center for Lean Healthcare Research at Ohio State University. He got his PhD in 2015, investigating the leadership behaviors essential to the successful, sustainable implementation of lean principles in hospitals. He also teaches at VU University and several Business Schools and is a popular speaker at conferences.