In the Netherlands and Europe, there exist approaches to refugee (re)settlement where asylum seekers face long waiting periods, in large-scale centres often isolated from Dutch society, with little-to-no opportunity to structure their day or participate in activities which bring meaning to their lives. These activities, which bring meaning people’s lives are termed occupations in the occupational therapy and occupation science literature. When the context hinders the opportunity to engage in these meaningful occupations, one experiences a situation of occupational injustice. These approaches taken in the Netherland and internationally creates the state of occupation injustice, this lack of ability to engage in meaningful activities, and this is turn has been documented to have negative effects on refugees health, well-being, identity and eventual inclusion in society.Parallel to these standard approaches in the Netherlands, are alternative approaches to refugee resettlement and integration. These alternatives are oftenbeing facilitated by charities, community-based organizations and citizen initiatives. Alternative programs currently aim to counter the government programs and focus on safe passages, for vulnerable populations, with an emphasis on early inclusion in society, community placement, sponsorship, and integration from the time of arrival. These alternative programs claim to address the issues of lack of meaningful engagement and isolation as currently seen in standard procedures, thereby claiming to improve integration, inclusion and wellbeing.This research aims to explore the lives and experiences of both the individuals living in, as well as the individuals facilitating these alternative programs. The research will explore how these programs are situated in and/or actively negotiating the broader context of refugee programs and policies in the Netherlands. This exploration will include the perspectives of the multiple actors involved, including service users and service providers, using a participatory methodology.Through exploring the perspectives on alternative programs through a participatory evaluation format, we are able to explore these programs as they are described, evaluated and experienced by theservices users themselves. This allows for a grounded understanding of the programs and their further potential.
Children with special educational needs included in Austrian mainstream schools are provided with special educational support, which aim to create learning environments, that meet the children’s needs on an individual level. Little is known about what adjustments children with special educational needs in mainstream school classes require to promote participation in school occupations. This is the first study in Austria exploring the student-environment-fit from self-perceived children’s perspective and comparing this to teachers’ perspective by using the School Setting Interview. In this cross-sectional matched pairs study twenty-five children (mean age 12.5 ± 1.4) with special educational needs and twenty-one teachers from six Austrian secondary schools were interviewed. Participants’ ratings were analyzed descriptively and statistically with Wilcoxon-Sign Rank Test. Reported adjustments from the child and teacher perspectives were analyzed with qualitative content analysis and presented using the occupational, social and physical environmental dimensions from the Model of Human Occupation. Results indicate perceived student-environment-fit differs between school activities as well as between children and teachers. Three out of 16 school activities showed a statistically significant difference between children and teacher matched-pair analysis. Children perceive more unmet needs then teachers. Most adjustments are reported in the social environment dimension and inform practitioners what adjustments are perceived to be useful for children with Special Educational Needs and their teachers. Both children’s and teacher’s perspectives provide valuable information. Significantly, children in this study were able to identify required needs and describe adjustments. To increase participation in school occupations, children can and need to be actively included in the decision-making process.
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Frequent claims are made for the importance of the hospitality industry, and wider tourism sector, as potential and actual creators of employment. Many of these claims emanate from industry representative and advocacy organizations, often as part of their legitimate efforts to lobby governments for favourable treatment of their sectors. Good quality universal statistical data on employment in hospitality are noticeable by their absence, although information collected by bodies such as the International Labour Organization is extensive. This paper reviews the current state of data availability on global hospitality employment (with a primary focus on commercial hospitality operations) and seeks to employ these secondary sources in investigating the question as to whether we can in fact make plausible statements about the extent of such employment. This exercise is important both to contextualizing claims made for the employment generating capacity of the hospitality industry and to shedding light on the degree of seriousness with which data might be treated in wider policy contexts. The paper concludes, with cautious optimism, that commercial hospitality is a significant global employer and that the claims made for this employment by representative and advocacy organizations are plausible if treated with circumspection.
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Dutch society faces major future challenges putting populations’ health and wellbeing at risk. An ageing population, increase of chronic diseases, multimorbidity and loneliness lead to more complex healthcare demands and needs and costs are increasing rapidly. Urban areas like Amsterdam have to meet specific challenges of a growing and super divers population often with a migration background. The bachelor programs and the relating research groups of social work and occupational therapy at the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences innovate their curricula and practice-oriented research by multidisciplinary and cross-domain approaches. Their Centres of Expertise foster interprofessional research and educational innovation on the topics of healthy ageing, participation, daily occupations, positive health, proximity, community connectedness and urban innovation in a social context. By focusing on senior citizens’ lives and by organizing care in peoples own living environment. Together with their networks, this project aims to develop an innovative health promotion program and contribute to the government missions to promote a healthy and inclusive society. Collaboration with stakeholders in practice based on their urgent needs has priority in the context of increasing responsibilities of local governments and communities. Moreover, the government has recently defined social base as being the combination of citizen initiatives, volunteer organizations , caregivers support, professional organizations and support of vulnerable groups. Kraktie Foundations is a community based ethno-cultural organization in south east Amsterdam that seeks to research and expand their informal services to connect with and build with professional care organizations. Their aim coincides with this project proposal: promoting health and wellbeing of senior citizens by combining intervention, participatory research and educational perspectives from social work, occupational therapy and hidden voluntary social work. With a boundary crossing innovation of participatory health research, education and Kraktie’s work in the community we co-create, change and innovate towards sustainable interventions with impact.
