Prevention and empowerment
Our goal is to increase the accessibility, effectiveness and feasibility of prevention in care and well-being. We do this by ...
project
Blijf aan Z
Remain in Play
Nursing tops the list of the top 10 bottleneck professions. But there is also a large staff shortage for other healthcare professions. Although working in healthcare is very rewarding, it turns out to be difficult in practice to fill the open vacancies. This is not only due to a limited supply on the job seeker side, but also due to the large outflow. In the “Blijf aan Z” project, we examine precisely this last aspect.
The healthcare sector is facing a problem: there is a significant imbalance between the inflow and outflow of healthcare personnel, resulting in a persistent staff shortage. This is not only because too few new employees are entering the field, but also because the outflow remains unchanged: older staff members are retiring, others are changing careers or leaving the profession.
How can we prevent valuable employees from dropping out prematurely or leaving the profession? That is the central question in the ‘Blijf aan Z’ project. (Loosely translates to “Remain in Play”)
We started to investigate which factors influenced this outflow. Specifically, we identified the predictors of dropout and employee retention.
We’ll focussed on the predictors that healthcare organizations themselves could influence. For example, resilience or working conditions. With these predictors, we developed a tool (dashboard) with which our partners could measure and monitor the situation in their institution.
In addition, we developed two interventions with which healthcare institutions can increase employee retention. With the ‘Team Champions’ methodology, a team member was trained to increase the resilience of the team members and the entire team in an innovative way.
At the same time, we started a community of practice (COP), specifically for managers in healthcare with the central goal of ‘workplace cultures where healthcare workers want to (continue to) work’. This self-steering development trajectory broadens the horizon of managers by bringing them into a learning environment with colleagues in similar functions/roles but in completely different contexts.
Afterwards, the knowledge gained and the interventions developed were shared with the healthcare institutions and other stakeholders. Tools such as the dashboard remained available to the healthcare organizations.
Partners
‘Remain in Play’ is a joint project of the following partners: Gouverneur Kinsbergencentrum (project coordinator, BE), University of Antwerp (BE), Thomas More University of Applied Sciences (Antwerp-Mechelen, BE), Het Gielsbos (BE), Elisabeth TweeSteden Hospital (NL), and Fontys University of Applied Sciences (NL). The project is realized with the support of Interreg Flanders-Netherlands and the Province of Antwerp.
Researchers
Research line coordinator
Wessel van de Veerdonk
For his PhD, Wessel van de Veerdonk - epidemiologist (Msc) and nurse (Bsc) - focused on the Flemish Population Screening for Colorectal Cancer. Today, he is a researcher and coordinator of the Prevention and Empowerment research group.
Researcher
Marlon van Loo
Marlon van Loo has been a researcher in the People and Well-being Research Group since September 2022.
Researcher
Wendy D'haenens
Wendy D'haenens (PhD) has been a lecturer-researcher in the People and Well-being research group since 2016. She is an expert in subjective and objective evaluation of hearing, (classroom) acoustics and ICF (WHO) applications within speech therapy
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