Caring Regions as a Trading Zone: Shaping Regional Older Person Care through Organizational Pilots, Policy Strategies and Social Science
Caring Regions as a Trading Zone: Shaping Regional Older Person Care through Organizational Pilots, Policy Strategies and Social Science
Submitter: Jitse Schuurmans, Erasmus University Rotterdam, schuurmans@eshpm.eur.nl
Abstract:
Caring regions are geographies of health and social care ‘in the making’, seeking to find new ways to deliver healthcare in a regional setting. Regional collaboration and innovation should provide emplaced solutions to a fast-growing population of older persons living in non-urban areas against the backdrop of a similar fast decrease of healthcare personnel in those areas. We build on four years of interventionist research in the Netherlands, engaging with organizations, quality platforms, policy makers, healthcare professionals and (future)clients to find feasible solutions to emerging problems as well as opportunities to rethink and ‘redo’ care. As interventionist-researchers, we travelled with regional actors through their landscapes exploring regional care provision and co-organized national (virtual) market squares including folk music to share and stage best practices. In this Making&Doing contribution, we share our audio, visual and sensed experiences of understanding and enacting regional cultures and ways of caring, as well as connecting the different worlds of policy, organizations, and science in doing – and trading – healthcare reform. We use the notion of the Trading Zone to point out how these worlds became connected (or not) and how we as researchers have become implicated in the aim of making regions a place of care.
Areas of STS Scholarship: Governance and Public Policy, Forms and practices of expertise, Urban STS
Authors/Participants: Iris Wallenburg, institute for Health Policy and Management
Jitse Schuurmans, Erasmus University Rotterdam
Roland Bal, Erasmus University Rotterdam
