As PhD candidate, you will contribute to the project at Erasmus University Rotterdam and focus on persons with dementia in the community and their family carers. In collaboration with stakeholders, you will co-produce innovative reflexive arrangements for regulation, based on narrative methods. The project aims to innovate and enhance connections between service users, providers and regulators. In addition, it is meant to develop a regulatory toolkit to enhance accountability and dialogue based on the use of narrative methods by networks of multi-sectoral service providers. The PhD-project comprises an action-oriented mixed method approach in which the researcher develops innovative regulatory arrangements together with stakeholders, including service users, service professionals and inspectorates. You will closely work together with stakeholders and researchers, including PhD candidates and postdoctoral researchers from the other universities involved. In addition to doing research, you will participate in our teaching programmes.

• You have a Master's degree in, for example, public administration, health sciences, psychology, sociology, anthropology, or science and technology studies.
• You have an affinity with regulation, service provision and groups in a vulnerable position in society.
• You have excellent knowledge of advanced qualitative research methods, and are familiar with quantitative research methods and keen to further develop this knowledge.
• You have academic excellence, as demonstrated by your grade transcripts and CV.
• You have a good command of written and spoken Dutch and English (Fieldwork will be conducted in Dutch.)
• You should be willing to travel for fieldwork.
• You act with professional and scientific integrity and have excellent social skills as required for fieldwork and interviews.
• You are able to empathically interact with vulnerable people and deal with their sometimes distressing situations in a professional manner.
• You are able to work independently and in close cooperation with the daily supervisor and other members of the research project team and multidisciplinary research group.
• You have strong skills in project management, flexibility, a proactive approach, and excellent academic writing skills, so that you will be able to finish the PhD project in time.

We offer an appointment as PhD student for the period of 1.5 year, but with the intention to extending the position to a 4-year period. Remuneration will be according to the PhD scales set by the Collective Labour Agreement for Dutch Universities and ranges from

€ 2434 in the first year to € 3111 in the fourth year. In addition, there is a holiday allowance (8%), a set end-of-year bonus (8,3%), and generous opportunities for post-doctoral training and attending scientific conferences. Full time is considered to be 38 hours a week.

Erasmus University Rotterdam / Erasmus School of Health Policy & Management

Erasmus School of Health Policy & Management (ESHPM) is part of Erasmus University Rotterdam and  responsible for a bachelors and three (international) master programmes on health policy, economics and management, serving more than 800 students. ESHPM is a multidisciplinary school with research focusing on three main themes: ‘competition and regulation in healthcare’; ‘quality and efficiency in healthcare’ and ‘healthcare management’. The position is offered in the Healthcare governance group, which operates on the intersection of these three main themes.

Healthcare governance

The Healthcare Governance Group studies the new roles, position and identities of practitioners, patients and regulators, and how they interact and steer healthcare. Through projects as well as strategic partnerships the group engages with practitioners and regulators to understand governance ‘from within’. Research usually is practice-based (often using ethnographic methods) and theoretically oriented, displaying the diverse disciplinary backgrounds in (amongst others) science & technology studies, public administration, sociology and health sciences. The group participates in all teaching programs of the school.