RICHARD GROL chairs the department of Quality of Care at the Radboud University Nijmegen, and holds a personal chair at Maastricht University, Netherlands. He is director of the Centre for Quality of Care Research (WOK), one of the leading research centres on quality and safety of care in the world, and is acting director of the Nijmegen Centre for Evidence Based Practice, one of the University’s research institutes.

Having graduated with degrees in law and psychology, Grol worked as a psychotherapist and educator for a number of years, turning his attention to health care quality in the 1980s. He founded and was the president of the European Association on Quality in Family Practice for 10 years, chaired the Quality Committee of the World Organization of Family Doctors for 5 years, and acted as advisor to the Dutch College of Family Physicians for 12 years.

Professor Grol supervises a large number of research projects on the quality of patient care, particularly in the area of primary health care and supervised over 50 PhD students so far.

He is author of over 450 scientific and professional papers on the issue, as well as lead editor or author of over 20 books related to quality of care, including a comprehensive handbook on quality improvement and change in patient care (Grol et al. Improving Patient Care. Oxford: Elsevier 2005).

He recently received honorary fellowships of the World Organization of Family Physicians (WONCA)  and the Royal College of General Practitioners in the UK.

In 2006 he got a Royal Award: Order of the Dutch Lion (Ridder in de Orde van de Nederlandse Leeuw) for the unique scientific work on quality in health care.