In recent years, it has become a commonplace to argue that cities should be the focus point of sustainable development. Various authors have presented a variety of arguments why cities should be the preferred target to foster sustainable development-focused innovation; - The average consumption of resources of urban dwellers is higher. - The population of cities is growing continuously, while rural populations stabilize. - Deteriorating living conditions and segregation in cities caused by processes of gentrification of traditional neighbourhoods that drive out lower income groups to the suburbs. - Cities are ‘concentrated’ emitters of pollutants and therefore solutions and re-use might be easier to implement. https://doi.org/10.3390/su11185013 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/karel-mulder-163aa96/
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The World Health Organization engages cities and communities all over the world in becoming age-friendly. There is a need for assessing the age-friendliness of cities and communities by means of a transparently constructed and validated tool which measures the construct as a whole. The aim of this study was to develop a questionnaire measuring age-friendliness, providing full transparency and reproducibility. The development and validation of the Age Friendly Cities and Communities Questionnaire (AFCCQ) followed the criteria of the COnsensus-based Standards for selection of health Measurement INstruments (COSMIN). Four phases were followed: (1) development of the conceptual model, themes and items; (2) initial (qualitative) validation; (3) psychometric validation, and (4) translating the instrument using the forward-backward translation method. This rigorous process of development and validation resulted in a valid, psychometrically sound, comprehensive 23-item questionnaire. This questionnaire can be used to measure older people’s experiences regarding the eight domains of the WHO Age-Friendly Cities model, and an additional financial domain. The AFCCQ allows practitioners and researchers to capture the age-friendliness of a city or community in a numerical fashion, which helps monitor the age-friendliness and the potential impact of policies or social programmes. The AFCCQ was created in Dutch and translated into British-English. CC-BY Original article: https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph17186867 (This article belongs to the Special Issue Feature Papers "Age-Friendly Cities & Communities: State of the Art and Future Perspectives") https://www.dehaagsehogeschool.nl/onderzoek/lectoraten/details/urban-ageing#over-het-lectoraat Extra: Vragenlijst bijlage / Questionnaire attachement
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Background: Many intervention development projects fail to bridge the gap from basic research to clinical practice. Instead of theory-based approaches to intervention development, co-design prioritizes the end users' perspective as well as continuous collaboration between stakeholders, designers, and researchers throughout the project. This alternative approach to the development of interventions is expected to promote the adaptation to existing treatment activities and to be responsive to the requirements of end users. Objective: The first objective was to provide an overview of all activities that were employed during the course of a research project to develop a relapse prevention intervention for interdisciplinary pain treatment programs. The second objective was to examine how co-design may contribute to stakeholder involvement, generation of relevant insights and ideas, and incorporation of stakeholder input into the intervention design. Methods: We performed an embedded single case study and used the double diamond model to describe the process of intervention development. Using all available data sources, we also performed deductive content analysis to reflect on this process. Results: By critically reviewing the value and function of a co-design project with respect to idea generation, stakeholder involvement, and incorporation of stakeholder input into the intervention design, we demonstrated how co-design shaped the transition from ideas, via concepts, to a prototype for a relapse prevention intervention. Conclusions: Structural use of co-design throughout the project resulted in many different participating stakeholders and stimulating design activities. As a consequence, the majority of the components of the final prototype can be traced back to the information that stakeholders provided during the project. Although this illustrates how co-design facilitates the integration of contextual information into the intervention design, further experimental testing is required to evaluate to what extent this approach ultimately leads to improved usability as well as patient outcomes in the context of clinical practice.
