Interview with: Joeri De Ren

Interview with: Joeri De Ren, Zorgbedrijf Antwerpen

In the UHCE project, a tool box will summarize practical experiences with regard to personalized integrated care pathways, what advice would you give to enable wide spread implementation of Urban Health Centres 2.0 in European cities?

Often toolboxes are quite academic and therefore hard to implement. A good toolbox aims at being applicable deep into the organization and has to facilitate understanding and insight for all staff involved in sharing and later implementing best practices. Therefore, a good toolbox is designed as to transferring knowledge in a short span of time, in a practical and even game-like fun way. Designing good toolboxes means taking the role of the target audience, leading them towards a “what is in it for me” insight and reaching them the tools to implement it into daily work and transferring it onto colleagues. Once such a toolbox is designed, it will be passed on and shared virally and hence become widely-spread.

How would you suggest to build intervention programmes to reduce rate of falls or risk of falling?

At Zorgbedrijf Antwerpen we have developed an intense programme in order to reduce incidents and we have learned that basically three specific methods work. The first is raising awareness in a nice interactive way. The type of shoes to buy, the role of medication and the need for small adjustments inside the house are then easily adopted. The second is actually guiding people from A to Z through the choice of small measures that can be taken inside the home. This means giving them advice, ordering goods if necessary, setting appointments for installation and training them in the use of those means. Finally we have learned that most incidents happen in the bathroom inside the homes and here as well we offer a service that goes from advice till refurbishing the bathroom with a floor-level shower, including the cleaning of the house afterwards.

What role have environmental home hazards to reduce injuries ?

There is an extensive list of such hazards, but we have found that basically some are far more important and easy to implement then others. Examples are making sure there is adequate lighting throughout the house and especially the stairs, that people do avoid storing things on very low of very high shelves, that people choose the right chair to sit on (height, armrests…), that carpets are well fixed and do not slip,… We know that the majority of risk is inside the homes and just a set of 5 to 10 cheap and easy measures can reduce the risk dramatically.

What types of physical exercises would you recommend?

From our observations (and proof is in research) the best prevention is for people to remain active in any possible way for as long as they can. This means moving about (doing their groceries, small cleaning tasks, a daily walk…) much more then specific exercises. Also meeting people, engaging in interaction and having hobbies is important for staying alert. Hence we aim at bringing people together, making sure they can for as long as possible remain active in as many as ways possible. Social and physical isolation tends to lead to more incidents. Facilitating for people to remain active in all possible ways is the best prevention and one could say that active ageing is the best exercise.