Why the PRoF Chair?
As from the start we strongly believe in bringing together innovative partners to create additional value through cooperation. The academic world is known for its expertise in research and has a world wide network for knowledge exchange whereas other healthcare stakeholders tend to operate on a more local scale. The PRoF Chair initiative aims to encourage cooperation with the academic world to combine the local and global knowledge levels in order to leverage innovative ideas and set up future collaborations in the spirit of open innovation and value creation.
2nd PRoF Chair goes to K.U.Leuven - prof. dr. Chantal Van Audenhove
The PRoF Chair was created to support academic research in healthcare as leverage for industry-academia partnerships in a spirit of open innovation and value creation. Ghent University was the first holder of the PRoF Chair. In 3 years’ time they helped realize several innovative health care projects. For the period of 2019-2021 the Chair was awarded to KU Leuven. New holder of the Chair, Chantal Van Audenhove, is definitely up for the challenge.
Chantal Van Audenhove has been director of LUCAS at KU Leuven since 1996. LUCAS is an interdisciplinary research centre, focusing on 5 topics: social trends in care, care for the elderly, mental healthcare, communication in care relationships and welfare, poverty and social exclusion. The collaboration with the PRoF consortium will definitely give a boost to their research: “Thanks to the PRoF Chair we will be able to further focus on implementation research, helping us to understand what, why and how innovations in the real world work.” |
|
Jan Van Hecke, chairman of PRoF, is a strong believer of implementation research, a relatively new field of study focusing on implementation processes and strategies. He too is looking forward to a fruitful cooperation between the Chair and the PRoF partners: “Nowadays, ‘return on investment’ and ‘value for money’ equally apply to social services as well. Society rightly expects that the outcomes of often expensive research programmes can be put to use in everyday practice, in an effective and preferably a cost-effective way, too. Implementation research can help academia to live up to these expectations.”
1st PRoF Chair: Ghent University - prof. dr. Renaat Peleman
PRoF awards the chair for research in healthcare to the University of Ghent for a period of 3 years. During this period the 100.000EURO will be used to launch a yearly call for which interdepartmental and international cooperation together with innovative results in healthcare will be important criteria for the Chair award. In the past, Ghent University has awarded a very limited number of chairs, the PRoF Consortium is proud of this academic recognition.