Joep Perk MD, PhD

Born February 1945, Joep Perk grew up in The Netherlands. He obtained his medical education at the University of Utrecht where he got his medical degree in 1971. Following service in departments with internal medicine, surgical and obstetrical focus, he joined a relief project in Lesotho, Africa for a few years, something that shaped his strong and never-ending interest in preventive healthcare. By his Swedish wife Christine, whom he for the first time met already in his late teens, he was attracted to Sweden where he since 1976 worked at the hospital in Oskarshamn, 1988–2001 as head of the department of medicine and 2006–2011 as its chief physician.

Joep Perk defended his Ph.D. thesis entitled: Cardiac Rehabilitation. Medical and Socio-economic Results of a Comprehensive Program, in 1989, was appointed as associate professor of medicine at the University of Linköping in 1994 and professor of health sciences at Linnaeus University, Kalmar in 2007. In 1999, he was promoted to doctor honoris causa at the University of Timisoara, Romania.

Joep Perk became a member of the Working Group for cardiac rehabilitation of the European Society of Cardiology (ESC) in 1993, serving as its chairperson from 1997–to 1999. In 2004, he was appointed chairman of the, on his initiative, newly established European Association for the Prevention of Cardiovascular Disease. His imagination, knowledge, and wise leadership were crucial to the positive development of the association and garnered admiration within the ESC leadership. He also participated in and led several ESC task forces, not the least those working on joint European guidelines for cardiovascular prevention and the Heart Score, an established European system for risk assessment, of which he was one of the creators.

Joep Perk was the author of many important scientific contributions and served as the editor of the 2007 comprehensive textbook Cardiovascular Prevention and Rehabilitation, the first to take a seamless approach to this important field of medicine. He was a frequently invited lecturer and much-appreciated lecturer at various domestic and international courses and served on the committee that organizes the large, annual ESC cardiology congresses. Active into his last moments, he was working on ideas on how to improve the implementation of cardiovascular prevention in a number of countries still with a high burden of such disease and lectured on preventive guidelines at a large Swedish cardiovascular meeting just the months before I succumbed to rapidly progressive disease.