Within the next decade, the number of professional- and family carers will be insufficient to deal with the increasing demand for care. The shortage on the labor market for health care professionals becomes evident by the time the demand for care exceeds the supply1. In order to find solutions to make the supply of care services sufficient and fitting to the demand for care, researchers, professionals, and business administrations, all in the domain of health care, work together with SMEs in the iKOP project.
Amsterdam as a lab. That is what Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences' three fieldlabs and its many partners have in mind. Functional illiteracy, debts, learning deficiencies or problems caused by extreme precipitation: the city contains plenty of tough issues, demanding novel approaches in which co-creation and participation by residents, social organizations and knowledge institutions are basic principles.In the fieldlabs, people try to change current practices by working with, instead of for or on behalf of those whom it concerns. But how to achieve effective learning environments between parties? How to encourage stakeholder participation in complex issues? And how to build new relations and roles?
The model of the Best Practice Unit (BPU) is a specific form of practice based research. It is a variation of the Community of Practice (CoP) as developed by Wenger, McDermott and Snyder (2002) with the specific aim to innovate a professional practice by combining learning, development and research. We have applied the model over the past 10 years in the domain of care and social welfare in the Netherlands. Characteristics of the model are: the interaction between individual and collective learning processes, the development of (new or better) working methods, and the implementation of these methods in daily practice. Multiple knowledge sources are being used: experiential knowledge, professional knowledge and scientific knowledge. Research is serving diverse purposes: articulating tacit knowledge, documenting the learning and innovation process, systematically describing the revealed or developed ways of working, and evaluating the efficacy of new methods. An analysis of 10 different research projects shows that the BPU is an effective model.
