Thanks to Dirk de Korne, Marjo de Boevere en Teis Arets – 20-12-2023
Every quarter we invite one of the care partners involved in QoLEAD to share their perspectives – on AI, design or on working in academic project. The first partner sharing their insights: SVRZ.
SVRZ (Stichting voor Regionale Zorgverlening), a care organization, we joined the QoLEAD project a year ago as one of the four healthcare partners. They provide small-scale nursing home care, rehabilitation, and support for the elderly, including those with dementia, across more than 60 locations in Zeeland.
SVRZ indicates they wholeheartedly embrace collaboration with academics. That is why in QoLEAD, they want to open up their work practice as a ‘living lab’ as much as possible. Their living lab provides researchers with a valuable opportunity to apply and acquire knowledge in a real healthcare environment, with direct involvement in care processes and with healthcare workers.
However, as Dirk de Korne, director Care & Wellbeing at SVRZ, indicates: transdisciplinary collaboration requires effort and time. “We notice that sometimes we speak different languages.” They collaborate with diverse backgrounds, from academics to healthcare professionals to large organizations such as Alzheimer Nederland.
From their perspective, the university should immerse itself as much as possible in practical reality, rather than creating a lab within the academic world. For example, Teis Arets, PhD candidate in QoLEAD project, spent two weeks interning with them last summer. His goal was to gain knowledge with his internship on dementia and its impact on the environment. From their perspectives, it allowed to show the impact of dementia along various real-life experiences. It also helped to think about how to connect new technological developments to what is possible in practice. Moreover, it gave insight into the support (draagvlak) and capacities there would be for such technologies among potential end users. Marjo de Boevere, team leader at SVRZ: “Innovation and the academic world are far removed from the practical reality of healthcare. In the internship I mostly aimed to highlight the significant gap in work- and thinking levels between academia and the workplace. The success of innovation depends on the space allocated for implementation. Reality teaches us that that is not always the case. Management generally understands, but there is a tendency to overestimate the adaptability of the workforce.”
The ‘living lab’, according to SVRZ, thus offers benefits for both the academy and themselves: it is through the project that they can leverage the latest scientific insights and technological developments. But all in all, they do it all for one goal: accelerating the actual implementation of state-of-the-art knowledge.