The Academic Collaborative Center Older Adults: A Description of Co-Creation between Science, Care Practice and Education with the Aim to Contribute to Person-Centered Care for Older Adults

Long-term care for older adults is in transition. Organizations offering long-term care for older adults are expected to provide person-centered care (PCC) in a complex context, with older adults aging in place and participating in society for as long as possible, staff shortages and the slow adoption of technological solutions. To address these challenges, these organizations increasingly use scientific knowledge to evaluate and innovate long-term care. This paper describes how co-creation, in the sense of close, intensive, and equivalent collaboration between science, care practice, and education, is a key factor in the success of improving long-term care for older adults. Such co-creation is central in the Academic Collaborative Center (ACC) Older Adults of Tilburg University. In this ACC, Tilburg University has joined forces with ten organizations that provide care for older adults and CZ zorgkantoor to create both scientific knowledge and societal impact in order to improve the quality of person-centered care for older adults. In the Netherlands, a “zorgkantoor” arranges long-term (residential) care on behalf of the national government. A zorgkantoor makes agreements on cost and quality with care providers and helps people that are in need of care to decide what the best possible option in their situation is. The CZ zorgkantoor arranges the long-term (residential) care in the south and southwest of the Netherlands. This paper describes how we create scientific knowledge to contribute to the knowledge base of PCC for older adults by conducting social scientific research in which the perspectives of older adults are central. Subsequently, we show how we create societal impact by facilitating and stimulating the use of our scientific knowledge in daily care practice. In the closing section, our ambitions for the future are discussed.