Jan Lavrijsen

Dr. Jan Lavrijsen (MD, PhD) is an elderly care physician and senior researcher, lecturer and program leader Neurological diseases in Elderly Care Medicine/long-term care at the Department of Primary and Community Care of the Radboud University Medical Center Nijmegen, The Netherlands. His expertise is in particular on long-term care for patients with prolonged disorders of consciousness (PDOC). His PhD (2005) was on ‘Patients in a vegetative state: diagnosis, prevalence and long-term care in Dutch nursing homes’.
He was one of the founders and the first lecturer of the post academic training program for nursing home physicians (since 2009 renamed ’elderly care physicians’) in Nijmegen and the head of this program from 2000 until 2011.
In 2011, he founded a research group dedicated to the severest outcomes of acquired brain injury in the long-term care. Since 2016, he leads the nationwide academic network of expertise for patients with severe acquired brain injury (EENnacoma https://www.eennacoma.nl/). In that network the research group collaborates with several nursing homes and a specialized rehabilitation center for patients with PDOC. Since 2019, he is the program leader in the development of centers of expertise in long-term care for patients with PDOC, including a knowledge center. He is (co)author of dozens of publications on PDOC or severe brain injury and as co-supervisor involved in 5 PhD projects. In 2021-2022 he was member of the board of the Dutch Brain Injury Alliance. In 2023 member of the board of the Dutch Association of Elderly Care Physicians.