Consolation Wise: The Wisdom of Comforting Experiences
To better educate healthcare professionals on the topic of consolation, the ‘TroostWijk project’ (Consolation Wise project) was launched. This project collects comforting experiences from the lives of older people.
Centre of Expertise Health Innovation
Caring for people
The world of (future) healthcare professionals is overloaded with protocols. This creates a challenge to seek proximity from person to person. Because how can you and the patient together accommodate yourselves in the field of 'not-knowing' and build a human relationship? There should be space for grief and mourning. A former patient expressed this wisely: "The very moments when healthcare professionals met me in my full human existence, and not just as a patient, were particularly comforting for me."
Learning from experiences
In order to improve the training of healthcare professionals in the area of consolation and emotion support, it is important that they are inspired. This is what the TroostWijk project provides for. In this project, comforting experiences from the lives of older people, to which care professionals have contributed (consciously or unconsciously), are collected and shared with (future) care professionals in various ways.
The research
The elderly have a special role in this project as a source of wisdom. What can they, with their life experience, tell us about consolation? How can we learn from the comforting stories they carry with them? Elderly people with different profiles will be interviewed by students from both nursing degree programmes.
Interpersonal contact between caregivers and carers takes place in two mutual directions. Therefore, healthcare providers are also interviewed. Students will interview caregivers about their experiences concerning consolation, and also about what they think they need to offer consolation in practice.
The ‘TroostWijk’ Toolkit
The toolkit is the result of the TroostWijk research; a phenomenological exploration of comforting experiences of experts by experience and healthcare professionals. 19 stories on consolation were included in the TroostWijk booklet. In this collection, nursing students, healthcare professionals (in training), researchers and elderly people by experience tell what consolation means to them and what it looks like in their lives. These stories form the basis for the toolkit. You can find the collection via this link.
The work forms in the toolkit invite you to feel, reflect, experience for yourself what your perception of consolation is. In words, images and with silence. Alone or with others. Whether you are a (healthcare) professional, student, carer, teacher or person looking for meaning; this toolkit is for you. Use the work forms to look for the comforter within yourself, share experiences and engage in conversation.
Available work forms:
- Message in a bottle - a poetic working method dealing with consolation
- Consolation in a matchbox
- Four times 'Why' - Reflection without a model
- Museum of Consolation - Out of your Head and into your Hands
Collaboration
This project is a collaboration between the researchg group Relational Care at The Hague University of Applied Sciences, the nursing training of ROC Mondriaan (mbo) and The Hague University of Applied Sciences, the HagaZiekenhuis, Dasein, foundation OMAZ and the Lukas church in The Hague. The project was subsidised by BAVO Stichting Heemstede.
Team
- Lieke Hollander ([email protected])
- Yvonne van Zaalen ([email protected])
Contact
Would you like to know more about the TroostWijk research? Then contact Marleen Eikelenboom, [email protected]