The EMGO+ 2010 annual report is online

The annual report for 2010 of the EMGO Institute for Health & Care Research is online. The report is electronic-only this year, which makes it readily available, easy to browse through and easy to disseminate in the wider local, national and international scientific community (and it helped us to save some trees and money).

Please take some time to browse through the report. This will inform you about the very interesting range of programs, projects and research topics our institute covers, and about our infrastructure that supports our research. When reading the report you will notice that our efforts in 2010 have resulted in output and impact that is (again!) substantially better than in the year before. We have published substantially more, without a reduction in quality of the papers, our citation index remained at its constant high level, we were able to acquire another record high amount of Euros in external grant money, and we were again able to show that our work is regarded as highly relevant by our external stakeholders.

The fact that our 2010 results show better performance than the 2004-2009 period, i.e. the period that was evaluated as excellent on all counts in the report of the external international evaluation committee, is very good news for the institute.

The EMGO+ annual meeting is underway

Today we have our annual meeting of the EMGO Institute for Health and Care Research. The entire day is focussed on measurement, which is, of course, one of the cores of scientific research and progress. As Baron Kelvin said: "if you cannot measure it, then it is not science". But measurement comes in many different ways, and to quote another icon of science -Einstein-: "not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be conted. Our program today is about computer adaptive testing, on using smart phones in measurement, on applying registrations, etc. This program was designed by Dr. Caroline Terwee, the coordinator of the Knowledge Center for Measurement of the EMGO Institute for Health and Care Research.

At the end of the meeting the societal impact and science awards were granted and celebrated, and the EMGO+ junior fellows, i.e. the mid-career researchers within the institute that are supported by EMGO+ with personal post-doctoral grants to boost their research careers - were interviewed (see photo), as well as the junior researchers who received travel grants to establish international collaborations.
Ludeke Lambeek recieved the science award for her paper in the British Medical Journal on the economic evaluation of integrated care for low back pain patients.
Hanneke Wijnhoven received the societal impact award for her work in developing, testing and disseminating the SNAQ questionnaire to detect undernutrition in the elderly.

Wendy Brouwer defends her doctoral thesis on exposure to internet health promotion interventions

Today, Dr. wendy Brouwer defended her doctoral thesis on exposure to internet-delivered interventions aiming to promote health behaviors, such as healthy eating, non smoking and physical activity. Her thesis research shows that characteristics of the users predict whether they will go to a health promotion website, but that characteristics of the intervention are crucial predictors of really using the web-based intervention and staying long enough to get exposed to the health promotion information and feedback. Major parts of her research are published in scientific journals such as the Journal of Medical Internet Research and Health Education Research.