Conny Helder

Plans to tear down most of Huize St. Catharina in Bergen op Zoom in order to build a new facility faced some resistance due to the perceived historical value of the complex from 1929.

However, the municipality decided against listing it as a heritage site, paving the way for its demolition.

Conny Helder (born 27 November 1958) is a Dutch healthcare manager, who has been serving as Minister of Health, Welfare and Sport as part of the fourth Rutte cabinet since 2024.

She was born in The Hague and trained to be a surgical assistant.

Helder was born on 27 November 1958 in The Hague.

She attended the secondary school Jan Campert Mavo in that city in the years 1971–74 and subsequently did havo and vwo at Thorbecke Lyceum.

Helder applied to study medicine but was rejected because of a quota, and she started studying chemistry at Leiden University in 1978 instead.

She dropped out the next year to follow a training at Bronovo and Westeinde, two The Hague hospitals, to become a surgical assistant.

She completed it three years later and started working.

Between 1986 and 1988, Helder also followed executive training in healthcare at The Hague University of Applied Sciences.

She did another part-time study at Leiden University during this period in political science but did not finish it.

Helder started filling managerial positions in hospitals, initially in The Hague and Amsterdam.

In 2000, she became manager at the University Medical Center Utrecht's (UMCU) surgical division.

She switched to the surgical specialties division of the same hospital four years later.

She rose to managerial positions in hospitals and served as chair of the board of directors of an Eindhoven network of primary healthcare centers starting in 2010.

Helder became director of tanteLouise, a major provider of elderly care in the Bergen op Zoom area, seven years later and was involved in a number of projects to renovate existing and construct new nursing homes.

She also led a regional cooperation to promote innovations in the elderly care sector.

Helder left UMCU in July 2010 to become chair of the board of directors of the Eindhoven Corporation of Primary Health Care Centers (SGE).

The organization operated ten centers in the city of Eindhoven with general practitioners, pharmacists, physiotherapists, and psychologists, among others.

It was suffering from a €1.6 million operating deficit as well as a conflict between Helder's predecessor and healthcare professionals.

Helder told upon her appointment that she wanted to expressly involve the latter group in important decisions.

In 2015, under her leadership, SGE opened a new healthcare center in Strijp-S for expats living in Eindhoven after an evaluation had shown that many expats did not trust the Dutch healthcare system due to the relatively important role of general practitioners.

Helder started serving as director of tanteLouise, an elderly care provider active in Bergen op Zoom, Steenbergen, and Woensdrecht, in June 2017.

Back then, the organization employed 1,800 people and took care of approximately 4,000 elderly people, including 1,100 in its approximately fifteen nursing homes.

She wanted to improve the healthcare chain and to sign more longer-term agreements with health insurance companies and municipalities.

The following year, one of its nursing homes in Steenbergen started experimenting with augmented reality glasses for medical diagnoses by remote specialists.

Her tenure also saw the closing of some facilities, mostly older and smaller retirement homes, and the construction and renovation of others.

To enable these changes, a temporary facility with close to 100 units was opened in 2019 on the grounds of mental institution Vrederust in Halsteren.

Helder became chair of the board of directors of the West-Brabant Care Innovation Center (CIC), a cooperation between local healthcare providers to promote innovations, in 2019.

A few months before, a new nursing home of tanteLouise for dementia patients called Hof van Nassau had opened in Steenbergen, featuring several technological innovations such as GPS trackers to allow inhabitants to roam around more freely.

It drew attention from the BBC, CCTV, and a delegation from Tsinghua University, and Helder joined Minister of Health, Welfare and Sport Hugo de Jonge on a working visit to China.

tanteLouise was heavily affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, which reached the Netherlands in February 2020.

Helder, who had become a board member of the trade association ActiZ the month before, made frequent media appearances to comment on the pandemic and to advocate the association's positions.

When the fourth Rutte cabinet was formed, Helder was asked to join as Minister for Long-term Care and Sport on behalf of the centre-right People's Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD).

She was sworn in on 10 January 2022 and has proposed a plan to provide more elderly care at home rather than in nursing homes in reaction to the aging population of the Netherlands.

She succeeded Ernst Kuipers as Minister of Health, Welfare and Sport in January 2024 following his resignation.

In January 2020, Helder joined the board of ActiZ, a national trade association representing about 400 elderly care providers.

The first case of the coronavirus in the Netherlands was detected on 27 February, marking the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in the country.

Together with other leaders of healthcare organizations in North Brabant, Helder established the Regionaal Overleg Niet Acute Zorg (RONAZ; Regional consultation of non-acute care) the following month.

The body advised nursing homes to close their doors to visitors in order to mitigate the spread of the virus to this vulnerable group; Helder complied and did not allow any visitors starting on 16 March.