Marjan Meinders, PhD

M. Faber

Senior researcher

+ 31 (0) 24 36 15305
Marjan.Meinders@radboudumc.nl
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Marjan Meinders, PhD

Marjan Meinders, PhD is a senior researcher and theme leader Patient empowerment at IQ healthcare. She supervises doctoral research but is also involved as a project leader and project advisor in short-term research and advice projects, often related to policy matters.

Central theme in Marjan Meinders''research is the role of the patient in shaping patient empowerment. Patients are capable of contributing important values to the care process as well as to their own health. However, most patients need assistance with that. In her research Marjan Meinders develops and examines several ways of offering this assistance. For example with a decision aid or with applications on the Internet, which are aimed at improving communication and provision of information between physician and patient in an innovative way.  

The role of the patient is also a recurring theme when choosing a doctor, physiotherapist or hospital. Even though Dutch patients are given a lot of freedom to choose a doctor or a hospital, their choice has often been based in only a limited way on quality information. This was the conclusion of the PhD study “Choosing healthcare providers: healthcare consumers' use of comparative performance information” by Nicole Ketelaar. A follow up project [link toevoegen naar site ZonMW? http://www.zonmw.nl/nl/projecten/project-detail/kwaliteit-van-zorg-langdurige-zorg-inventarisatie-en-ontwikkeling-clienteninformatie/samenvatting/] focuses on patients needing long-term care, in which we study the way patients choose their care as well as the need for support. Our aim in this is to try and understand in what way personal targets play a role and what is the role of information about choices. Additional partners in this project are Impuls (www.impuls-onderzoekscentrum) and the University of Maastricht (CAPHRI).

An important theme in Marjan Meinders' research is joint decision making. Previous research projects resulted in systematically developed decision aids (see for example www.parkinsonkeuzehulp.nl). In Kristie Venhorst’s PhD project an important step will be taken: the implementation of Option Grids (www.optiongrid.org) in Dutch hospitals. By means of a minimal implementation strategy (only a short illustration on how Option Grids can be used) medical specialists will be able to get to work with it. The implementation strategy will be further improved on the basis of their experiences. This project is a collaboration between IQ healthcare, the Knowledge Institute of Medical Specialists (KiMS) and Darthmouth College, USA.

To sum up, Marjan Meinders research focuses on the question how patients can be supported in exerting influence on their care process and their own health.

Some key publications in the past two years:

Barr PJ, Scholl I, Bravo P, Faber MJ, Elwyn G, McAllister M. Assessment of patient empowerment - a systematic review of measures. PLoS One. 2015;10(5):e0126553.

Kauw D, Repping-Wuts H, Noordzij A, Stikkelbroeck N, Hermus A, Faber M. The Contribution of Online Peer-to-Peer Communication Among Patients With Adrenal Disease to Patient-Centered Care. J Med Internet Res. 2015;17(3):e54.

Faber MJ, Grande S, Wollersheim H, Hermens R, Elwyn G. Narrowing the gap between organisational demands and the quest for patient involvement: The case for coordinated care pathways. Int J Care Coordination 2014;17:72-78.

Ketelaar NABM, Braspenning JC, Westert GP, Faber MJ. Patients’ expectations of variation in quality of care relates to their search for comparative performance information. BMC HSR 2014; 14(1):617.