Leadership in care
Research theme
The care sector has to deal with staff shortages and is facing the challenge of a population that is ageing fast. Competent and devoted caregivers are of vital importance. We research how we can develop leadership competences of individual caregivers, but also how we can optimise the context, such as work environment, leadership style of the person in charge, professional identity, and team dynamics. We develop competence frameworks, encourage competence-oriented learning, and strive for an effective implementation in care organisations. As such, we improve the quality of the care, we work on good patient experiences, promote the cost effectiveness, and deal with staff shortages.
Developing care professionals and the surrounding context
What are we researching and for whom?
Healthcare in Belgium is facing some huge challenges, such as the continuous improvement of the quality of care and life. Innovation can provide an answer to these challenges. The sector is facing especially large shortages of caregivers and on top of that, the population is ageing fast. However, competent and skilled caregivers are indispensable. Taking up leadership and embracing innovation are competences that were insufficiently focussed on until now. We also notice that the context surrounding the caregivers can have a lot of impact. We also want to study and optimise those contextual factors.
Desired outcome
We develop and validate competence frameworks, we promote competence-oriented learning, and we strive for an effective implementation in care organisations. We begin in Belgium, but next we would like to continue this internationally as well.
Research lines
We are researching how we can develop leadership competences of caregivers. We are working on competence management and we also implement research results in care organisations. We support organisations by means of implementation guides and workshops and other sessions.
Leadership competences of impressive caregivers
We strive to strengthen the expertise, communication skills, sense of responsibility, flexibility, future vision, and innovative skills of individual caregivers. Additionally, we also optimise the context, among which work environment, leadership style of the person in charge, professional identity and team dynamics. We are currently researching how we can achieve a safe team environment in care organisations.
Competence management of impressive caregivers
We list the competences of caregivers and support them in their lifelong learning. We do this by means of e-portfolios with the development and validation of competence frameworks, and by promoting competence-oriented learning.
Implementation of tools into other contexts
We collaborate with elderly care, hospitals, home care, and multidisciplinary group practices where we implement our guidelines. We also provide good practices and scenarios to support this. The final result is more job satisfaction, better quality of care, and higher retention of caregivers.
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