Well-known emergency doctor Luc Beaucourt (73) died of skin cancer
Luc Beaucourt was not the man who looks back, he himself admitted in an interview on his seventieth birthday. “I don’t regret anything in my career,” he said, “I would do everything the same way.” Always looking ahead, even when it was designed with a permanent skin cancer, it came up with application. Two years ago he mentioned about this: “I have used: the more you go to doctors, the more they find, and then you end up in a street… I want to stay out of the hands of doctors for my last years, we’ll see how it goes.”
Recently it turned out that the cancer had spread, and on Friday Luc Beaucourt died, such a family member.
Luc Beaucourt grew up in Sint-Amandsberg, near Ghent. He ended up in Antwerp as a medical student, and this is where he will stay.
From 1983 Beaucourt was head of the emergency department at UZ Antwerp. There he had the idea of sending a mobile emergency group to the track in medical emergencies, which was found in 1985. He was also the man behind the medical intervention plan for Antwerp.
Weekend Accidents and Foreign Missions
In the 1990s, based on his experience, he personally took up the fight against weekend accidents, with 8,000 school lectures in which he created confrontational images. He said about this in 2019: “When I came to the site, I always had a small camera with me, and I took a picture of the purchased situation. The hardest images ended up in my selection, I had three carousels of eighty slides each. When I started doing that, I was very heavily attacked in the media by behavioral therapists who felt that what I was doing was not possible. But I notice that twenty years later, more and more ‘shock campaigns’ are emerging, just think of the photos on cigarette packs.” Under the impulse of Beaucourt, the province of Antwerp had its first WODCA campaigns in 1994.
From that year, Beaucourt also became the man of the foreign missions, after an earthquake in India. There are many more to follow, of which the next earthquake is the most troublesome: “The thousands of dead and wounded that lay everywhere during the days, and the total anarchy in the country made the mission extra difficult.”
In the politics
From 1999 Beaucourt also tastes politics. In 2000 he became a councilor in Kontich, for the CVP. Later he stood up for the VLD, and in 2009 he switched to LDD van Dedecker. That year he went through the hardest part of his life. “First my father died, then I make a mistake and I get the press all over me.” Beaucourt was caught at 174 km/h on the E34 in Lille. “I want to quickly forget this year,” he said.
After his experience with what he believes to be money-consuming B-Fast, Beaucourt founded V-Med in 2008. This is how he ended up in Myanmar, where he returned 50 times both professionally and touristically, and fell “in love” with it.
“Mentor who gave many opportunities”
Beaucourt retired at the UZA in 2013. There he worked closely with nurse Davy Crols, who also went on several missions. “Like a white seed in a rough shell, that’s how I’ll always remember Luc. A doer, someone who didn’t protect from the bureaucratic system in care, but who really stands for people, helping them. Luc has been like a father to me, a mentor who gave as many opportunities as possible. He was a closed person, did not flaunt his emotions. He was someone who didn’t need many words, a look was enough for us. Never, but next to us he had natural authority partly thanks to his impressive stature. A unique person.”
In recent years, Beaucourt was still active in the travel assistance of VAB, among other things. Maarten Matienko mainly remembers his drive there. “He immediately jumped into the breach, no matter what happened. He went to help many Belgians abroad, whether they were seriously ill in snow avalanches. Critical, always busy, feet on the ground, an enormous added value for effective solutions, that was Luc Beaucourt.”