Van Kemenade ACT

The White and Yellow Cross Care Foundation (WYCCF) choose for Trusted Care as its motto. Besides Trust, the letters of the word CARE stand for Client centricity, Attentiveness, Respect and Empathy.  To make the motto more active Everard van Kemenade will conduct a three day training in November for all staff members working at Sint Martin’s Home on Person Centred Care and Passion.

Part of Person Centred Care of course is knowing your resident.  For that purpose and as a preparation for this training a Guideline Life Story is written helping to describe the resident’s life story. The guideline will be further developed and put into practice starting from the training. Research has shown that life stories increased empathy, deepened relationships with patients, and led participants to feel more satisfied in their role as providers. The stories were considered useful for end-of-life discussions. Life stories incorporated into physician practice helped health care providers feel more connected to their patients and ultimately more satisfied in the care of nursing home patients (Qu et al. 2019). We will keep you posted on the effects of the Life Stories at Sint Martin’s Home.

Qu,J., Goldman, L. and Wilkinson, J (2019)  Patients’ Life Stories in Bringing Meaning to Nursing Home Care, PRiMER. Vol 3: Issue 11. DOI: 10.22454/PRiMER.2019.181832

 

On Thursday August 29th my neighbour and world famous expert in lighting Wout van Bommel invited some friends living in his neighbourhood to visit the company his family is famous for: Van Bommel shoe Factory. Wout organised that his brother Frans (78 years years old, retired CEO of the company) gave us a tour through the history of the business and that he hosted a site visit. We were received generously with coffee and sweets, an introduction video (with safety precautions ! ) and a chat.  The enthusiasm and  passion of the former CEO  was contageous.  He showed us around, answered any question with pleasure and lectured on shoe manufacturing. Van Bommel is famous worldwide for their Quality. Timeless, expensive, sustainable shoes.

Interested in Quality, I was especially touched by the explanation and demonstration of the Goodyear method, wherein pitch wire is used to stitch the sole to the top. In 1869 Charles Goodyear patented his manufacturing machine that increased the longevity and sustainability of shoes. The procedure requires more skills, more time; but creates increased Quality. This, of course, also increases the price of the shoe. Frans van Bommel appeared to be a passionate ambassador of the method. And I became a Goodyear fan too.

Unfortunately, as he told us, most shoes are produced nowadays with cheaper ways of doing like the so called Blake method. Luckily Van Bommel keeps using the Goodyear stitch for (some of) their shoes. But it makes me sad to see how -again- Money wins from Quality…

     Goodyear versus Blake

The visit to the factory ended with a video presenting the history of the family company and the three sons of Frans, the 9th generation who run the business now. In the movie their grandfather, Jan van Bommel, appeared. In a hard time after WWII he spoke the memorable words: ’The days are tough, what do we have to do? Produce a cheaper product and abandon the name we have worked for so hard? What ever we did in the past would have been for nothing. We continue manufacturing our well known Quality product. The fame of our product needs to be sustained against any price’.

Let us listen to grandpa! As a customer I would be willing to pay more and wait nine weeks for my Quality shoes. And I am not the only one. Frans van Bommel told us that people in Africa who cannot afford to buy a car or a bike, but have to walk many miles a day, save money to be able to buy Goodyear method produced shoes. So, change push to pull, boys!!!

I learned a lot that afternoon, thanks to the Van Bommels.

Just recently I heard that my latest article will be published in TQM Journal. It is a concept analysis – following Walker and Avant – of Emergence. Walker and Avant (2014) suggest writing several cases to clarify the concept: a model case, a borderline case, a related case, a contrary case and an illegitimate case. Here I present  the modelcase on the teaching team Master Integrated Care Design.

The Master Integrated Care Design from the Utrecht University of Applied Sciences started in 2007 as a not government financed course with 4 students and 4 part-time teachers. The external developments in the world of work ask for healthcare and social work professionals who are capable to make connections, to design innovative interventons and who can make integrated carehappen. Participants in the two-year program exactly develop these competences. The program appeared to be very popular. Since the start the amount of  students gradually increased to 133 first year students and 64 second year students in 2018-2019. Since 2017 the master program got its official financing from the Ministry of Education and Sciences in the Netherlands. In 2018 the program is  (re-)accredited by the Dutch-Flemish Accreditation Organisation (NVAO). The growth of the program led to increased pressure on the teachers. They searched in their network within (internal interaction) and outside the university (external interaction) for  completion. That caused an exponential growth of the teacher team to 20 staff members. The team that emerged is different than the sum of its parts. It is extraordinary in its diversity of gender, ages, experience, scientific discipline. Yet it is very harmonious in a sense that it is new to all members (novelty) and that is not easy to explain. The harmony stays also when new members are asked to join in (synchronicity). Synchronicity can also be noted in the way team members fit in the curriculum. The quality of the cooperation creates continuous learning of the group as a whole and of individuals within (synergy). The new pattern is coherent, was unexpected and unpredictable. It is not the result of planning (unplanned). Some instruments are used to sustain the team coherence (co-teaching, journalclub en social events). Result is that the master program is highly appreciated by the students, even now it has grown,  as the data of the National Dutch Student Survey (Nationale Studenten Enquete) 2018 show (score 92 on a 100 point scale). The master program takes the shared third place of all masters in the Netherlands as mentioned in the ‘Keuzegids’.

This might clarify the concept of Emergence, so crucial for quality management in the 21st century.

Walker L.O. and 
Avant K.C. (2014),
“Strategies for 
Theory Construction in Nursing”,
Pearson Prentice Hall, Upper Saddle River, NJ.

On June 21^stthe Neuman Systems Model (NSM) conference on “Exploring Population Health: Building Bridges with the Neuman Systems Model” started with a Gala.

A video was shown in which Betty Neuman welcomed the guests (not being able to come herself). She honoured Marlou de Kuiper for her efforts for the NSM. The evening continued with a World Café . Unfortunately this was the only not-lecture of the conference. It is time conference organizers understand people cannot listen for eight hours a day.

I spoke to Jacquie Fawcett about the Created Environment, the part of the model that interests me most. That’s why I was also very pleased with the content of the workshop by Rachel Coffey about how they teach students to take more care about themselves and how they increase their self-efficacy.

Nice also the workshop on concept mapping and its use for care planning.

Interesting how Jacquie Fawcett translates the NSM to population health, creating  the “Conceptual Model of Nursing and Population Health: Neuman Systems Model Perspective. A pity that the visual representation is so linear and so little systemic.

I presented my poster on The Quality Paradigms and the NSM.

As a result of the conference, I definitely will study more about Neuman’s Created Environment and ways to increase self-care of care professionals.