Visit to Albeda College Rotterdam - Paul Ineson


The fourth meeting of the Face to Face partnership was situated in Albeda College, Rotterdam. The visit was scheduled over 2 days from Monday 10th to Tuesday 11th of October 2011. The primary purpose of this meeting was to build on the previous work started on our last visit to Italy, i.e. for partners to identify barriers to success for students and identify the support in place to help overcome these barriers within each of their own education systems. For this meeting, each partner focused on gathering information on students’ barriers to participation on a more personal level, primarily using 1-1 interviews and individual student experiences.
On Monday morning we had had a short presentation on the rationale and mechanism behind the recently negotiated local partnership of Foundation Rijnmond Hospitals. The main reason behind this partnership (also known as a covenant in the Netherlands) is to help recruit, train and retain people working in health and social care in the local area. By involving all the relevant stakeholders and working together, it is hoped that the ever increasing demands on the health and social care sector in the Rotterdam area can be met successfully. We also had a showing of a very impressive and emotive documentary film by Sjoerd Oostrik, a young, newly qualified & talented film maker. The film was titled Destiny. The documentary centred around a recent student of Albeda College: Destiny and gave a brief ‘snap shot’ of her day-to-day life and the challenges she faced as a young single mother with very little money and family support. This certainly struck a chord with the majority of partners who had experienced similar situations with some of their own students. The film added a very personal and real dimension to the barriers faced by students and effectively highlighted the plight of many learners who struggle to balance a difficult home life with the demands of full-time education.
On Monday afternoon, we had two very interesting visits, firstly to a newly built (opened in 2008) local hospital – Vietland Hospital and secondly, to Rheuma Revalidation centre Rotterdam a rehabilitation centre primarily aimed at elderly care. On entering the Vietland Hospital we were all struck by the impressive architecture & unique design of the facility. The hospital had an organic ‘feel’ which reminded me of buildings in the style of Frank Lloyd Wright. The facilities were state of the art and certainly appeared to offer a very efficient and high standard of care for its patients.

Later in the morning, we were also given a presentation which covered the approach adopted by the hospital to nurse training which included structure and progression routes. This was followed by very interesting talk on the strategies used to motivate and retain staff. Like many countries in Europe, the Netherlands is having great difficulty recruiting and retaining nursing staff to meet the demands of an ever increasing elderly population. In the afternoon we visited the Rheuma Revalidation centre and we were given an extensive tour of the facilities and an interesting presentation about their facility. We were also informed about the referral system adopted for patients that require rehabilitation for various conditions. The facility was very impressive and had a very structured and organised programme of care and rehabilitation for its patients.
On Tuesday morning all the partners made presentations which were centred around more research collected from their own work places. The research this time focused more on 1-1 interviews and more personal accounts from students regarding barriers to participation. This was further re-enforced very effectively later in the morning, when partners interviewed eight students from Albeda College about barriers to participation from their own perspective. This was a very rewarding and useful exercise which was greatly appreciated by all the partners. From my own personal perspective, I was struck by the similarities in the barriers identified by students at Albeda College in comparison to LMC students. In particular, when related to their work placement.
Late morning, the group discussed the commonalities that had emerged over the last two days of activities. In preparation for the UK visit, the partners agreed to look at all the research and data collected from each partner via the documents previously uploaded to the Face to Face website and independently produce a summary of their own conclusions.

Finally, I would like to thank Annemiek van Workum and the Netherlands team for their generous hospitality and for organising an excellent programme that made a valuable contribution to the project.