• Vilans | Utrecht | Senior onderzoeker | 2024-10-01 - present
• Vereniging Gehandicaptenzorg Nederland | Utrecht | Adviseur | 2025-06-01 - present

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Personal information

Hennie Boeije is professor of an endowed chair in Organization of (informal) care and support for older adults and people with disability at the Department of Organizational Sciences, VU Amsterdam. She is a senior researcher at Vilans, Utrecht. The contribution of informal carers, such as family caregivers and volunteers, has always been important in terms of the extent of care they provide, quality of life and well-being. Recently, the urgency motive has been added: family caregiving is needed because of an ageing population and labour market shortages. Vilans, the National Centre of Expertise for Long-term Care in the Netherlands, has established the endowed chair which offers great opportunities. Vilans has intensive, long-term contact with organizations and professionals in long-term care. They do a lot of projects with stakeholders and societal partners. De bridging function that I have facilitates the use of knowledge from scientific research in practice on the one hand, and enables relevant questions in long-term care to be addressed in academic research on the other. The combination enables research, knowledge dissemination and implementation to improve care and well-being.

Research

My research interests focus on collaboration between professional staff and informal carers. This is one of the solutions to deal with scarcity in the nearby future. But are the assumptions correct that informal care can still grow? And is the caring relationship a source of support or stress? What does it mean for professionals to work with people who do not do so professionally?

My research focuses on three topics: a. the organisation of collaborative relationships in institutions and home care settings, b. the collaborative process between professionals and informal carers, and c. the impact of collaborative relationships on quality of care, well-being and professional identity. I am interested in care for older adults and for people with intellectual disabilities.

Publications deal with chronic illness, trauma, identity loss, informal care, coming to terms with hardship and health care. Other topics include the problems, needs and resilience of family members of people with intellectual disabilities during the Covid-19 pandemic and other transitions investigated in the ZonMw project on informal caregivers. Strength, resilience and involvement of patients and the public were investigated in a PhD project on young people with chronic illness. Another research project focused on labour force participation of people with acquired brain injury and sensory impairments from both people with disabilities, family members and employers using photovoice. Current projects involve trends in collaboration between formal and informal carers, relational identities in long-term care, reablement, multi-carers, and self-determination and autonomy in living arrangements and caring communities.

Background

My background is in Health Policy and Management and Sociology. I did both studies at Erasmus University Rotterdam. My PhD at Erasmus University Rotterdam was on quality of care in nursing homes from the perspective of nurses. I applied qualitative research methods, i.e. fieldwork, participant observation and interviews, and later made this my work as a qualitative methodologist at the Department of Methodology and Statistics, Faculty of Social Sciences, Utrecht University.

Working as a methodologist makes you a scientific generalist, as you are consulted on many different topics. I have written textbooks on qualitative methods and, in particular, on hard-to-understand qualitative analysis. In my research and also in my teaching, I always advocate taking into account the perspective of the stakeholders through qualitative research or patient stories. Recently, I have gained experience in collaboration with experts by experience, action research and learning networks.

At Nivel, I was coordinator of a research programme aimed at supporting people with chronic illnesses and (intellectual) disabilities to participate in society. With my team, we did mainly quantitative research with large surveys, but we also engaged in co-creation and working with experts by experience. For example, we developed the MyBot: a digital drawing tool to support young adults with a chronic illness with coping with treatment burden. Later on we co-created the tool UP! to support young people with a mental disorder. With this tool they make body maps to express themselves with visual means.

Grants

Over the years she received multiple grants of the National Organisation for Health Research and Development (ZonMw) for projects on quality of life of family carers, impact of Covid-19 on family carers, and well-being and recovery of young adults with a mental disorder. She was involved in a project on loneliness of people with mild intellectual disability from the National Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO). Multiple grants were also received from the Ministry of Health and Welfare and the Netherlands Institute for Human Rights on participation of people with a disability. She also received funding from equity funds, e.g. FNO and Agis Innovatiefonds, for projects about patient and public involvement, and from semi-public institutions, like the Netherlands Institute for Social Research (SCP) and the National Institute for Public Health and the Environment (RIVM).

Teaching

Hennie is thesis supervisor in the (Dutch) master's programme Policy, Communication and Management (Beleid, Communicatie en Organisatie). Master theses involve subjects on readiness and use of technology in home care settings, professional identities of staff in nursing homes and collaboration of informal carers and professionals. At the master level Hennie teaches in the course Governance and Algorithms in Care and Welfare.