Letter from the director

Dear Colleagues,

It is a pleasure to update you on some important developments within our Research School CaRe. 

Due to the Corona crisis, we had to cancel our annual CaRe days, which was a pity! Together with the CaRe directors, the board and the PhD representatives we had composed a beautiful program with the intriguing title: ‘Illusion or Reality. The influence of our mind on research and practice.’ Unfortunately, the Corona virus is not an illusion, but it is a reality, that we have to face every day. The good news however, is that we were able to postpone the program of this year to May 2021 and that all speakers have already agreed to participate next year. We hope that by then the virus is a reality of the past. 

For this year, we decided to have an online Symposium on the 2nd of June. Apart from the granting of the CaRe Award for the best PhD thesis defended in 2019, the content was, probably not surprisingly, mainly focused on COVID-19 Research. Jochen Cals had a keynote lecture on COVID-19 registrations in general practices in the Netherlands, followed by all CaRe Directors giving an overview of COVID-19 research currently performed in their institutes. It was impressive how much COVID-19 research is presently going on or getting started. It is good to notice that we as Research School CaRe are in the middle of this research area and that we seem to be so flexible that we are able to switch our direct attention towards this societal enormously relevant topic. On our website, you can access the lectures in order to see the overview of research. Maybe it leads to possible collaborations or it could help to avoid any possible overlap in new research projects.

I would like to congratulate our CaRe Award winners. Again, we had several excellent nominees out of the more than 400 PhD theses defended in 2019. Like 3 years ago, we had two CaRe Award winners namely Eva van der Meij (APH) and Nina Bartelink (CAPHRI). Congratulations with this excellent achievement!

I hope you enjoy reading this newsletter made by Annerika Slok with the input of all institutes and all our PhD representatives.

If you have any suggestions for CaRe, please do not hesitate to contact me, or your local director. All suggestions are more than welcome.

Kind regards,
Onno van Schayck

CaRe Award 2020

Usually, the CaRe award is being awarded during the CaRe days, followed by a presentation of the winner. However, since this event was cancelled, the winner was announced during the CaRe webinar of June 2nd, by the chair of the assessment committee Prof. Chris van Weel. And this year, we have two winners, ex aequo!

Congratulations Eva and Nina!
A great honor. You both have won an art object, and a money price of €500,-.

CaRe Webinar COVID-19

On June 2nd a webinar was organized by Researchschool CaRe about COVID-19 and the research that is being performed within the four CaRe institutes.

In the first part of the webinar Prof. Dr. Jochen Cals gave a presentation about initiating nationwide research in general practice during the COVID-19 pandemic.

After this presentation, Prof. Dr. Chris van Weel handed out the CaRe award for the best Dissertation defended in 2019. Spoiler alert: this year there are two winners!

In the last part of the webinar the four directors of the CaRe institutes gave an overview of the COVID-19 research that is being done within their institutes.

If you have any questions or remarks about their presentation, you are welcome to contact them!

COVID-19 related research

On our website we try to keep an overview of COVID-19 related research with the four CaRe institutes. 

Click here for an overview and the presentations that were given during the webinar on June 2nd. 

If you find something missing or incorrect, please contact us!

Aging and Later Life travel grant: Najada Stringa

From: Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, Amsterdam UMC, location VUmc,

To: Manchester Institute for Collaborative Research on Aging (MICRA) and Center for Integrated Genomic Medical Research (CIGMR)

Najada Stringa went to Manchester, UK for 8 weeks at the Manchester Institute for Collaborative Research on Aging (MICRA) and Center for Integrated Genomic Medical Research (CIGMR), University of Manchester. There she worked with data from the English Longitudinal Study of Aging (ELSA) on the association between genetics of low-grade inflammation, inflammatory biomarkers and frailty. Najada’s PhD is on genetics and gene-environment interaction in aging related conditions using mainly data from the Longitudinal Aging Study Amsterdam (LASA). This visit was useful not only for the current project but also for future networking possibilities on a personal level as well as between the two cohorts. The results will be soon submitted for publication.

‘Working abroad’ – Canada

Sascha Bolt

In the summer of 2019, I visited the University of Alberta (in Edmonton, Canada) where I worked in the faculty of nursing for about 10 weeks as a Trainee within the TREC (Translating Research in Elder Care) program. Alzheimer Nederland (the Dutch Alzheimer’s Association) awarded a traveling grant for my visit. Judith Meijers, my daily supervisor, is visiting professor at the Canadian university and has worked at TREC in the past herself. Judith joined me at the annual TREC meetings in June.

TREC owns a large database containing survey data and routinely collected RAI-MDS data from nursing home residents. TREC surveys collect data on characteristics of care aides (and other care professionals), structural facility and unit characteristics and organizational context. Data from these surveys are combined with resident data to explore associations. My project involved care aides’ psychological empowerment and work engagement and associations with resident outcomes (e.g. responsive behaviour, pain). The project is still ‘in progress’, along with a side-project investigating research utilization by care aides related to resident outcomes.

As a TREC Trainee, I learned a lot about the running of a large-scale research project and working with a large and highly secured database (e.g. working together with data managers and analysts). It was also very valuable to exchange research and practice experiences with (Asian) Canadian colleagues.

Of course, a trip to Alberta is not complete without setting foot on the Rocky Mountains. A road trip with my ‘significant other’ Niels was a very pleasant way to end this enriching and inspiring period abroad!

Rethinking Healthcare

Laurens Holst started in February 2020 as a PhD candidate in Health Insurance Literacy at Nivel after working two years as a Junior Researcher. In this period, he got the opportunity to develop himself as a researcher. A special experience was attending the International Summer Course ‘Rethinking Healthcare’ at the University of Copenhagen in 2019.

Approximately 25 students from all over the world with diverse backgrounds and ideas attended the three-week course. The main focus was to come up with new ideas and ways to rethink and reinvent the healthcare sector. The international group was challenged to develop new treatments and work processes for actual problems among healthcare providers in Denmark.

“The whole experience has refreshed my thoughts on how we can use research to improve healthcare and made me look critically at our usual research processes. These kinds of experiences contribute to perform good research and I want to encourage all PhD students to look for new experiences outside their current working environment.”

News from the institutes

APH
1. APH researcher Eline Heppe wins the finals of ´Dutch Hacking  Health´ in the category ´Best Human Centered´. Read more
2. Societal Impact Award has been awarded to APH researcher Arne Popma. Read more
3. Great atmosphere at the 4rd Annual Meeting of Amsterdam Public Health 2019. Read more
4. APH program leader Cees Hertogh received grant of 7.7 million euros by the Ministry of Health, Welfare and Sports. Read more
5. Amsterdam Public Health presents 10 recommendations for "Living 10 years longer in Amsterdam" during the We.Make.The.City festival. Read more

CAPHRI
1. The road to recovery after COVID-19. Read more
2. Hilde Verbeek is appointed as a member of The Young Academy and as Professor of Long-Term Care Environments. Read more​
3. State secretary Paul Blokhuis visited the Healthy Primary School of the Future. Read more
4. How to make ethically responsible corona policy? An interview with Peter Schröder-Bäck. Read more
5. “Ethnic or racial categories in health research don’t capture the complexity behind health inequalities”. A column by Alana Helberg-Proctor- Read more
6. ZonMw grant for project on Joined Informed Decision Making in Prenatal Screening. Read more​

Nivel
1. Aukelien Scheffelaar obtained her PhD with her dissertation entitled: Evaluation of the quality of long-term care relationships: A participatory study. Read more
2. Nivel monitors COVID-19. Read more
3. Exploration of the current and delayed consequences of COVID-19 for the general practitioner and general practitioner care. Read more
4. Research and Practice in times of COVID-19; Suzanne Portegijs works as a PhD candidate and a physiotherapist in a nursing home. Read more

RIHS
1. RIHS Awards 2019 awarded during the RIHS 'Koek & Zopie' event. Read more
2. KNAW Early Career Award for Geert Litjens. Read more
3. King Willem-Alexander meets up with Judith Wolf about the causes of doubling number of homeless people. Read more
4. General practitioners rarely order images for back problems. Read more
5.Citizen Forum on coverage decisions in the Dutch health insurance benefit package. Read more

The mission of The Netherlands School of Public Health and Care Research concerns: contributing to better health and health care through high quality training of young researchers and multidisciplinary cooperation between excellent research institutes in the field of primary health care, transmural care, public and occupational health and health policy, focused on the development and implementation of new scientific knowledge in these fields.

This mission is shared by the four participating research institutes of CaRe, i.e. CAPHRI (Care And Public Health Research Institute) of Maastricht University, RIHS (Radboud Institute for Health Sciences) of the Radboud university medical centre, APH (Amsterdam Public Health research institute) of the VUmc, AMC, VU and UvA in Amsterdam, and Nivel (Netherlands Institute for Health Services Research) in Utrecht.