Wietske Blom-Ham
Wietske Blom-Ham was appointed professor of Acute Care within the research group Proactive Care for Older People Living at Home on May 1st, 2023. Wietske will partner up with Nienke Bleijenberg, the professor of Proactive Elderly Care.
Wietske has been working as a researcher within the research group since August 2020 and focuses her research line on preventing unintentional side-effects from acute care in patients with complex multimorbidity.
Wietske has more than 15 years of experience as an emergency nurse at the UMC Utrecht. From there, together with nurses and doctors, she conducted doctoral research on pressure ulcers from preventive spinal immobilization in trauma patients (2017). In continuation of her PhD research, her research line focuses on the prevention of unintentional damage through acute care for patients with complex mulimorbidity.
Together with her team, she developed an intervention (ConnectEM) to improve acute care for mentally dysregulated patients. They are currently working on a national knowledge agenda around this theme and are conducting an international Delphi study for consensus and definition of the concept of 'mental dysregulation'. Other research within her line focuses on improving acute care for elderly people with vulnerable health condition. They are currently developing an anamnesis instrument that allows healthcare professionals to rapidly and efficiently map out both the acute care needs of the elderly and the context during initial assessment (ambulance and emergency care).
Wietske has the ambition to optimize the quality and safety of (nursing) care for patients who need acute care through research and education.
Fields of Expertise
- Acute Care
- Emergency Care
- Practice-based Research
