Academic Workplace

Academic workplaces are sustainable partnerships between science and practice. In Tilburg, this model is being applied mainly by Tranzo, the scientific center for care and welfare of the Tilburg School of Social and Behavioral Sciences (TSB). Tranzo was founded in 2000 by the University and the Foundation for the Promotion of Scientific Education and Research in Healthcare (SWOOG).

Originated in the sixties

This Foundation had been established in the sixties by Professor and hospital director Jacques Stolte, who fathered the Hospital Policy course at the then College. Tranzo was founded to last for no more than four years, but its success was so great that the center was incorporated into the Tilburg School of Social and Behavioral Sciences (TSB) in 2004. Tranzo focuses on transformations and innovations in the field, ranging from hospital care to social work. Together with institutions in practice, it has furnished twelve academic workplaces that run long-term joint research programs, in which science practitioners (professionals working both in practice and in the University) play a key role. Each science practitioner bridges a gap between science and practice, which, in some cases, leads up to the writing of a PhD thesis. There are workplaces in the fields of addiction, prevention, innovation of care and the elderly, where all collaboration takes place on an equal footing.

Aims

The aim of an academic workplace is to develop and exchange knowledge from three types of sources: scientific knowledge, care providers’ professional expertise and patients’ knowledge and expertise. The interaction between researchers, professionals (care providers and policy officers) and healthcare recipients is of the utmost importance. When he resigned, Professor Henk Garretsen (on the picture, on the first row)Tranzo’s chairman from the word go, wrote that Tranzo was initially more or less “tolerated” by the establishment as being little more than a “valorization society.” He is convinced that the academic workplace is a pivotal feature of the “third-generation university,” whose third core task, in addition to teaching and research, is knowledge utilization. Perhaps the Center is even an example of the “fourth-generation university, which is all about dynamic and open innovation, with professionals working partly inside the university and scientists working partly outside it.” Be that as it may, the topic of health is a booming one, also at Tilburg University. Under the heading of Enhancing Health and Well-Being, it is one of the three cornerstones of the impact program that was launched in 2017.