Purpose – The purposes of this paper are to 1) give an overview of the prevalence of HR practices that are used to retain vital older workers in health organizations, 2) to examine the evaluations of those HR practices, and 3) to determine the wishes for HR practices in three different target groups:older workers, line managers and HR professionals.Design/methodoly/approach - An inventory case study was conducted based on 51 interviews with older workers, line managers and HR professionals working in 15 hospitals and nursing and care organizations.Findings - Our results showed that maintenance HR practices focused on retaining older workers in their current jobs, in comparison with development HR practices, are by far more prevalent. In addition, maintenance and development HR practices, in general, are assessed being successful.Although wishes appeared to be strongly related to development HR practices, maintenance HR practices are mentioned as well.Originality/value - This paper aims to give an overview of the prevalence of HR practices used to retain older workers in health care organizations vital at work, which practices are evaluated as successful from not only line managers’ and HRM perspective, but from the older workers themselves as well.
Inaugural lecture, delivered upon public acceptance of the endowed professorship in Professionalisation of Nursing and Care in Elderly Care by Prof. Dr. Robbert J.J. Gobbens at Tilburg University on 29 September 2023.
The importance of specific professions for human rights realization is increasingly recognized. Journalists, teachers, and civil servants are all considered to play a role because their work affects individual rights. This is also the case for social workers. The connection between social work and human rights is evident in the large amount of literature explaining how human rights relate to social work. At the same time there is more attention for human rights localization. These fields of knowledge are related: social workers are local professionals and if they start applying human rights in their work this may influence human rights localization. This article contributes to existing debates on human rights localization by reflecting on the potential role of social workers in local human rights efforts in the Netherlands. Since human rights localization in general and human rights application in social work are recent phenomena in the Netherlands this provides a useful case study for a qualitative analysis on whether and how social workers can be regarded as actors in human rights localization. By connecting different actors that are said to play a role in human rights localization to proposed forms of human rights application by social workers this article identifies three possible roles for social workers in human rights localization: as human rights translators, as human rights advocates, and as human rights practitioners.
MULTIFILE
To optimize patient care, it is vital to prevent infections in healthcare facilities. In this respect, the increasing prevalence of antibiotic-resistant bacterial strains threatens public healthcare. Current gold standard techniques are based on classical microbiological assays that are time consuming and need complex expensive lab environments. This limits their use for high throughput bacterial screening to perform optimal hygiene control. The infection prevention workers in hospitals and elderly nursing homes underline the urgency of a point-of-care tool that is able to detect bacterial loads on-site in a fast, precise and reliable manner while remaining with the available budgets. The aim of this proposal titled SURFSCAN is to develop a novel point-of-care tool for bacterial load screening on various surfaces throughout the daily routine of professionals in healthcare facilities. Given the expertise of the consortium partners, the point-of-care tool will be based on a biomimetic sensor combining surface imprinted polymers (SIPs), that act as synthetic bacterial receptors, with a thermal read-out strategy for detection. The functionality and performance of this biomimetic sensor has been shown in lab conditions and published in peer reviewed journals. Within this proposal, key elements will be optimized to translate the proof of principle concept into a complete clinical prototype for on-site application. These elements are essential for final implementation of the device as a screening and assessment tool for scanning bacterial loads on surfaces by hospital professionals. The research project offers a unique collaboration among different end-users (hospitals and SMEs), and knowledge institutions (Zuyd University of Applied Sciences, Fontys University of Applied Sciences and Maastricht Science Programme, IDEE-Maastricht University), which guarantees transfer of fundamental knowledge to the market and end-user needs.
