Nele Van den Cruyce
Nele Van den Cruyce is Research Manager for Person-Centered Care at LUCAS, KU Leuven. With more than fifteen years of field experience in NGOs and academic research, she has developed deep expertise in how care and well-being intersect. Her research focuses on the social meaning and interpretation of health and vulnerability. This translates into three main areas of expertise, always focusing on the person experiencing vulnerability and their loved ones:
1/ Patient and family perspectives: the experiences of people living with chronic vulnerability and/or life-threatening conditions, and their loved ones.
2/ Innovation in care organization: the development and positioning of new roles, with emphasis on experiential knowledge, the involvement of peer experts, and epistemic injustice.
3/ Caring societies: transforming policies, organizations, and society to better align with the needs and wishes of people with vulnerabilities and their families - creating a “caring society,” with particular attention to underserved populations.
Nele is a recognized expert and member of the Superior Health Council of Belgium and serves on the boards of several non-profit organizations. Her work provides well-founded insights and concrete models for the transition from cure to care, and for the recognition of patient participation and lived experience as essential pillars in health and wellbeing.
Three key professional achievements:
* Chair of the Superior Health Council’s advisory report on peer support in mental health care – the first advisory report in which peer experts participated as full experts.
* Active member of the Academy for Primary Care, focusing on integrating the experiential perspective and the role of informal care actors in interdisciplinary collaboration.
* Participatory research on oncology walk-in centers as a practical example of the transition from cure to care, emphasizing the needs and wishes of (former) cancer patients and their loved ones.
Abstracts this author is presenting: