About two years ago, we had the great opportunity to develop a proposal together with stakeholders. There was a national funding opportunity in the Netherlands to submit proposals to improve the reintegration process for people who have been on sick leave for a long time. I was particularly happy to see, that they expected research consortia to apply an Action Research approach, which involves key stakeholders as co-researchers in an iterative process of planning, acting, reflection so that change happen in the community.
In a collaboration between University of Twente (Ria Wolkorte), Roessingh Research and Development (Kira Oberschmidt and yours truly) and Roessingh Arbeid (Edwin Magermans), researchers and stakeholders together explored the question of how to improve the reintegration process. We wanted to start with co-creation already before submitting the full proposal, so we organised interactive sessions with people who are involved in reintegration process: people who have been through this reintegration process themselves, representatives of employees and employers, and other parties involved (e.g. labour consultant, labour expert, company doctor and policy advisor). The sessions were prepared and facilitated by two great colleagues (students at the time): Yfke Dotinga and Stephanie Schouten. We wanted to learn about the strong and weak aspects in the current process, barriers and facilitators and opportunities, emotional aspects and values implicated when reintegrating. We carried out three sessions which were tailored to the group of people that worked with us that day. For example, with the group that had gone through the reintegration process as employee we focused on the experience (strong and weak aspects, emotions, values). Inspired by the idea of patient journeys, we could make a great overview of the current reintegration journey.
We learned that customization and collaboration are essential and there is much room for improvement. Often the employee is in a quite passive state and depends on the other actors in the process. During reintegration, redeployment with another employer is often considered late, although timely start of such an exploration can have a positive effect. To support a timely start, our idea was to develop a portal, which provides all information about the reintegration process and gives the employee and the employer more insight, allowing the employee to take more control of the process. The portal would also facilitate communication between involved parties and allow cooperation to develop a personalised route for that particular person.
The project proposal was submitted it in July 2022 and also presented it in Utrecht in October 2022. Edwin, Ria and I went together to Utrecht, and Ria did an awesome job presenting our project idea and the support we already had from many stakeholder groups. This was the first time that I had to defend a project idea in Dutch in front of a committee – which was quite something. Unfortunately, our idea was not among the 7 honoured projects (which can be found here).
Nevertheless, we were able to gain a lot of knowledge from the group discussions. We summarized these in a paper, which we wanted to get published in an academic journal. This was not really successful, and given that all authors have moved on and are busy with other projects, we do not have the resources to revise, re-format and resubmit this over and over again. But because we feel that the insights we got are important to share, we published this now as a white paper (in Dutch) open access on Zenodo (Link).
