Inholland University of Applied Sciences

This article analyses the innovative potential of Erasmus + Blended Intensive Programmes (BIPs) in aligning business and management education with the evolving expectations of employers and the global imperatives of responsible leadership. While the primary objective of this article is to provide empirical evidence on BIPs in promoting international academic engagement, it acknowledges that existing research on BIPs is limited in scope. Additionally, this paper aims to contribute to the advancement of responsible management education by examining how BIPs promote inclusivity and sustainability. Drawing on data from a student-centred survey with a total of 224 respondents, the study examines how BIPs foster innovative, inclusive, and internationally connected learning experiences. By capturing and analysing student perspectives, the research examines the impact of BIPs on key transversal and professional competences demanded by employers. Furthermore, the study explores how BIPs can drive the globalization of education and promote responsible management practices that support the UN Sustainable Development Goals, through accessible and resource-conscious international mobility. Findings reveal that BIPs can bridge gaps in equity and participation by lowering financial and logistical barriers, while cultivating international mindsets and social responsibility among students. This study provides a solid foundation for further research into BIP practices and impact.

Health care is undergoing rapid change due to digitalization, artificial intelligence, data-driven decision-making, and shifting patient needs. These developments raise complex ethical, social, and organizational questions that cannot always be addressed by conventional research methods alone. There is a growing need for tools that help stakeholders imagine alternative futures to surface underlying values. Futures studies and speculative fiction respond to this need by presenting "what if" scenarios that make uncertain futures concrete and discussable, enabling dialogue among diverse stakeholders such as health care professionals, researchers, policy makers, and decision makers. This paper examines how speculative fiction can be used as a structured yet imaginative tool in health care research. It positions speculative fiction as a tool within futures studies and participatory research approaches, outlining its conceptual grounding and clarifying its role that stimulates interpretation and reflection within methods such as focus groups, workshops, and surveys. In this way, speculative fiction complements established approaches such as human-centered design, contextual inquiry, and value specification by addressing what does not yet exist and making abstract future issues tangible. The paper presents a case study, The Digital Data Divide, in which speculative fiction was used to explore the use of personal data in health care. Two contrasting short films were developed to stimulate dialogue and invite participants to reflect on associated values. Insights from this case are structured into a 6-step practical reporting guide: determining whether speculative fiction fits the research aim, choosing an appropriate form of speculative fiction, creating or selecting speculative scenarios, engaging participants, analyzing responses, and sharing and disseminating results. Across these steps, the paper discusses methodological and ethical considerations, including alignment between scenarios and study aims, balancing utopian and dystopian elements, questions of plausibility and interpretability, and the need for researcher reflexivity. Overall, this paper contributes to the growing discussion on future-oriented tools in health care research by showing how speculative fiction can help address complex and uncertain challenges in ways that are accessible to a wide range of stakeholders and that support dialogue across perspectives, provided that its use is ethically transparent, methodologically explicit, and carefully reported. The paper concludes with a call to other researchers to also experiment with speculative fiction and to share their experiences with the health care research community to learn and advance its use.

Anxiety disorders are associated with a high disease burden throughout the life span. Anxiety disorders in older adults, however, remain frequently untreated, and when treated, pharmacotherapy predominates despite age-related risks and a preference for psychotherapy. Exposure Therapy is the most effective intervention for anxiety disorders and is a suitable treatment method to be delivered in primary care centres by mental health nurses. The primary objective of this study is to evaluate the (cost-) effectiveness of ET delivered by trained MHNs compared to usual care in reducing anxiety symptoms and improving quality of life among older adults with anxiety disorders in primary care. The secondary objective is to examine secondary outcomes, including comorbid depressive symptoms and disorder-specific anxiety symptoms. We also aim to investigate potential predictors and moderators of treatment outcome, as well as possible mechanisms of change in exposure therapy for older adults with anxiety disorders. A multi-centre cluster-randomised controlled trial conducted in primary care with two parallel groups: (a) exposure therapy, and (b) usual care, with one-year follow-up. Participants must meet the criteria for a primary Diagnostics and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, fifth edition anxiety disorder. Exclusion criteria are earlier treatment for anxiety disorder, other somatic and/or psychiatric morbidity that could interfere with diagnostics or treatment, being terminally ill, and having a moderate to severe cognitive impairment and stable pharmacotherapy use. The intervention consists of eight 30-min ET sessions delivered over 12 weeks. Primary outcome measures are anxiety severity as assessed with the Geriatric Anxiety Inventory, societal costs as assessed with the Trimbos and iMTA questionnaire on Costs associated with Psychiatric illness, and quality of life using the EuroQol 5 Dimension 5 Level version. Even though participating in present study involves a time investment for patients, we expect that they will benefit from the offered exposure therapy in a more effective way than usual care, as we anticipate a beneficial impact on their anxiety symptoms. If proven effective, exposure therapy could represent a valuable addition to existing clinical guidelines for the treatment of anxiety disorders in older adults within primary care settings. This study is registered at ClinicalTrials.gov (NCT06770517) on 26 February 2025.

In the Netherlands, youth work has recently seen the rise of community-based organisations founded by youth of colour from underserved neighbourhoods. Frustrated by the limitations of traditional welfare providers, these young founders draw on lived experience, local knowledge and relationships of proximity. A key motivator for their work is love. bell hooks defines love as the will to extend oneself to nurture one’s own or another’s spiritual growth. Black critical scholars have critiqued dominant, commodified and individualistic understandings of love, arguing instead for a collective, liberatory ethics of love centred around those who are marginalised, because they see that kind of love as transformative. Drawing on 18 months of ethnographic research, this article explores the tension between the idealised, transformative role of love and its realisation in the everyday practice of youth work with marginalised youth of colour. The article analyses the everyday actions of youth workers through the notion of a love ethic and elucidates how a transformative love for those most excluded is often compromised by discourses of deservingness and sectoral, financial and policy constraints. These limitations, however, are not merely individual failings but are structurally embedded within a youth work system shaped by short-term funding, outcome-driven evaluations and neoliberal logics. The article calls for a reimagining of youth work grounded in systemic change, with love as its foundation.

Frailty and cognitive impairments frequently co-occur in older adults. It remains unclear whether this overlap reflects shared underlying biological mechanisms or parallel but distinct disease pathways. We hypothesize that physical weakness and cognitive impairment share circulating markers already in an early disease stage. We therefore recruited and analyzed a relatively healthy population with partially overlapping pre-frailty and mild cognitive impairment (MCI), and applied a multi-omics approach to identify shared and distinct molecular signatures in plasma. Community-dwelling older adults were recruited, and frailty status was determined using the Fried frailty criteria. Cognitive function was assessed in all subjects using the Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA) and MemTrax tests. Blood samples were collected in the fasted state, and plasma was used for multi-omics analyses, including proteomic profiling using the SomaLogic 11 k platform, Nightingale metabolomics, and liquid chromatography–tandem mass spectrometry (LC–MS/MS). A total of 50 community-dwelling older adults (79.9 ± 0.5 years) were recruited, comprising 29 fit individuals (14 females, 15 males) and 21 pre-frail individuals (9 females, 12 males). Pre-frail individuals scored significantly lower on the MoCA test (− 12