dr. M (Martijn) Felder

Biography

Pure profile (aangepast)

Martijn is a social scientist who studies how relationships between healthcare organisations and care workers are changing as healthcare systems evolve. He obtained his PhD from the Erasmus School of Health Policy & Management (Erasmus University Rotterdam), where he currently works as an Assistant Professor. Before joining Erasmus University, he worked as a Junior Researcher in the Cultural Geography Group at Wageningen University.

Martijn takes an interdisciplinary approach, drawing on insights from sociology, organisation studies, political theory, economics and health services research. His research explores how workforce shortages, more flexible labour markets, and changes in welfare systems, affect healthcare organisations and care workers. In particular, he examines how these developments create new forms of dependency, inequality and negotiation, and what this means for workforce sustainability, organisational governance and the quality of care.

Martijn has played a leading role in several interdisciplinary action research programmes, including RN2Blend, Room for Resilience and the Horizon Europe project Support4Resilience. Through these projects, he has built a strong empirical research programme on workforce shortages, labour market flexibility, and quality of care. These themes also form the foundation of his broader theoretical work on welfare state transformation and healthcare organisation.

He has established an international network of collaborators across the United Kingdom, Norway, Germany, Italy and Australia, contributing to comparative research on workforce challenges and the changing political economy of care across different welfare states. His work has been published in leading international journals in health policy, nursing and the social sciences. He also serves as a reviewer for international journals and research funding programmes and received the Frans Rutten Research Award in 2024.

A defining feature of Martijn's work is its close collaboration with healthcare organisations, policymakers and knowledge institutes. This ensures that academic insights contribute directly to organisational practice, public policy and professional education. Through secondments at two national knowledge institutes, he contributed to influential policy reports on evidence-based healthcare decision-making and on the relationship between market regulation, healthcare bankruptcies and quality of care.

Martijn is Programme Director of the full-time and part-time MSc programmes in Health Care Management and coordinates the Advanced Research Methods course at ESHPM. He is committed to educating future healthcare managers and researchers by integrating contemporary organisational and policy research into teaching.

Across his research, teaching and societal engagement, Martijn aims to improve our understanding of how changes in welfare systems affect healthcare organisations, professional work and workforce sustainability. By working closely with societal partners, students and researchers from different disciplines, he seeks to generate knowledge that is both academically relevant and practically useful for healthcare organisations, professionals and policymakers.

His long-term ambition is to strengthen the theoretical and empirical foundations for understanding how welfare state transformations reshape healthcare organisations, healthcare work and the sustainability of the healthcare workforce.