If you’re looking for Dean Huibregtse, chances are you won’t need to look very far. Despite nearly thirty years of leading commercial sales teams, his favorite place is still at the center of the action: in the field with a customer.
“I often say, if you need to find me, probably call a customer or go see a customer, because that’s where I love to be,” says Dean. “My philosophy as a commercial leader is to listen to our customer’s needs first and foremost. If you don’t listen, you don’t understand. If you don’t understand, you can’t really help.”
Over the course of his career in the healthcare industry, Dean has seen a thing or two. As anyone who has worked in the world of the healthcare supply chain knows, there’s never a dull moment in a business where hospitals and clinicians are counting on you to effectively orchestrate the movement of tens of thousands of items needed for patient care from point A to point B in a short time frame. When the healthcare supply chain experiences a shock like the COVID-19 pandemic, Dean and his team work around the clock to create workarounds and contingencies that seem to almost bend the laws of physics.
His professional experiences have shown Dean much about the practicalities of leading: about being responsible for the careers of people working under you; about collaborating to solve unworkable problems; about developing a strategy for success and seeing it through. But the heart lessons Dean learned as a husband and father truly taught him how to lead. Lessons such as how strength, perseverance, and determination can help you defy the odds and make anything possible. Of the responsibility we have to carry our hardest-learned lessons forward and make them count. How every product that leaves an Owens & Minor distribution center bound for the hospital loading dock represents a patient. A person. A family. Sometimes, that family is your own.
Watch the video to see Dean share how Life Takes Care™ intersects with his professional and personal lives.
The Funniest Little Boy
In the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, in a hospital, Dean experienced firsthand the impact that he and his teammates can have at the point of care. After sixteen and a half years of lending his radiant smile to the world even as he battled a lifelong series of serious health complications, Dean’s son, Bennett, passed away in the hospital with his father and mother, Kristin, by his side.
It wasn’t the first time that Dean and Kristin had experienced this kind of devastation. Their first son, Matthew, lived for less than two days before succumbing to complications caused by the same rare genetic disorder that would later take his brother, Bennett. Known as ARPKD (autosomal recessive polycystic kidney disease), this rare genetic condition can begin to cause significant problems with a child’s kidney function soon after birth—sometimes, immediately.[1] Although the disorder is centered in the kidneys, ARPKD typically has cascading effects on other parts of the body and can severely impact a child’s ability to breathe, drive up their blood pressure, and cause growth failure. Although medical research has improved the outlook for babies born with ARPKD in recent years and helped doctors better understand how to treat it, even with the best medical care a staggering number of babies born with the condition—approximately 30%—still do not survive their first few weeks of life. [2]
Dean and Kristin recall that Bennett’s care team initially gave Bennett, who, like his brother, Matthew, was born with a severe case of ARPKD, similar dire odds. Yet from the moment he was born, Bennett showed a determination to beat them for as long as he could despite the significant health challenges he lived with. His parents describe a special, charismatic ability that allowed others to truly feel the joy and love in Bennett’s radiant, ever-present smile.
For Dean, Bennett always brought joy and meaning to the simplest things in life, regardless of how his condition might be affecting him at the moment. Bennett persevered and beat the odds he was born with, more than once. More than twice. Two kidney transplants, cerebral palsy, cortical vision impairment, and a host of other complications—and Bennet kept smiling, seemingly determined to showcase the gifts he could offer the world instead of being defined by what it had taken from him.
Leading With Purpose
There is a moment from the last week of Bennett’s life that, for Dean, drove home the powerful and tangible connection between the medical care his sons received, and the work he and the rest of the commercial team do each day to get supplies in the hands of clinicians. Dean recalls looking around the hospital and realizing that, not only he and his wife, but most of the nurses and clinical staff were wearing HALYARD* N95 respirators to help protect against COVID-19.
“Being in the healthcare field while also being a consumer of healthcare has really molded me and shaped what I do, from how I serve customers to how I serve the team I get to work with. Everything we do has a cause and effect,” says Dean.
That deep consideration and an understanding of how our actions impact others in ways seen and unseen is one of Dean’s defining characteristics as a leader and one that he instills in other teammates at every level of the commercial organization. “I believe in maintaining open lines of communication and regularly seeking feedback to ensure that expectations are being met. Acting with integrity, being transparent and accountable with our customers and each other, empowering teammates to get out in the field and do right by our customers—that’s how we stand up and deliver for healthcare.”
- National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases. https://www.niddk.nih.gov/health-information/kidney-disease/polycystic-kidney-disease/autosomal-recessive-pkd
- National Organization for Rare Disorders (NORD). https://rarediseases.org/rare-diseases/autosomal-recessive-polycystic-kidney-disease/