Tranzo Pearl | Older Adults Platform

In January 2022, the Older Adults Platform was launched. The Older Adults Platform is a permanent group of 10 older adults who actively and critically think with and advise the Academic Collaborative Center Care for Older Adults (AWO). The Older Adults Platform meets four times a year to provide solicited and unsolicited input to the AWO and ongoing research and practice products. In addition, they are occasionally asked for written comments, or they may be approached to contribute to research with which they have an affinity. Moreover, they suggest new themes for future research.

Deployment of parent participation

The involvement of older adults is expected to improve the quality of research through a better connection to their experience knowledge, ideas, needs, and priorities. In research therefore, older adults and other people receiving care increasingly play an active role because of their experience knowledge, for example as co-researchers. Researchers search for best ways of parent participation and learn about this as they go along. By working with the Older Adults Platform to find ways to make their input as meaningful and effective as possible and evaluating our collaboration, we also hope to eventually share our knowledge with a scientific audience by publishing an article about our experiences.

It is important that care for older adults is well attuned to the wishes and needs of older adults. This is why all of the AWO's research focuses on person-centered care. Therefore, it is important to involve and survey the right stakeholder groups, including the older adults themselves. Thanks to the Older Adults Platform, older adults are not only surveyed once for one of our studies, for example as respondents in an interview, but they can participate in the AWO at a higher level and on the basis of their experience knowledge to discuss and advise on all kinds of issues at stake. In this way, the research and the products resulting from it are as closely aligned as possible with the needs and priorities of older people.