Centre for Sustainable Healthcare Education (SHE)
I am the Director and Co-Funder of the University of Oslo’s Center for Sustainable Healthcare Education (SHE), which is a Centre for Excellence in Education funded by the Directorate for Higher Education and Skills for a period of 6 years
The overall objective of SHE is to inspire critical reflection among future health professionals about the meaning and implications of sustainability in healthcare, and more specifically, how the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) challenge health professional decision-making.
Our approach stems from the conviction that achieving the SDGs in healthcare requires not only scientific literacy but also emotional intelligence, critical reflection, and narrative competence. This calls for a re‑envisioning of the evidence‑based medicine framework—one that integrates biomedical knowledge with the human stories and cultural contexts that give illness meaning, and that balances attentive care for the individual patient with broader commitments to social justice, global equity, and the health of future generations.
To this end, we advance a translational humanities model of education—one that broadens the competencies of evidence‑based medicine to include empathetic listening, narrative sensitivity, and ethical reasoning, all of which are essential for navigating the paradoxes of sustainable care. For example, by engaging with diverse understandings of what constitutes “sustainable” care, students are prompted to reflect on how a treatment deemed sustainable for an individual in one context may be considered economically unfeasible precisely in the regions where it is most needed. A key methodological innovation in this work is the critical datathon. This interdisciplinary exercise brings together students from diverse academic and clinical backgrounds to analyze real-world materials — policy documents, health records, patient testimonies — through a combined narrative, conceptual, and data-driven lens.
The Medicalisation of Democratic Rights in the Debate about Abortion (MEDRA)
The goal of the project is to provide large-scale, corpus-based analyses of the co-constitutive relationship between democracy and medical knowledge in the debate about abortion as it unfolded since the early 1980s in three complementary case studies: US, Ireland and Argentina.
These are three representative democracies whose history of abortion legislation illustrates the complexity of different understandings of democracy, and the extent to which the concept of democracy itself is mobilised to support opposing positions.
Despite disagreements on the meaning of democracy and its relation to abortion in all three cases, all sides of the debate agree that the right to abortion is inseparable from the right to health, and is therefore a medical matter.
Constructing abortion as a scientific issue encourages both sides of the debate to mobilise medical knowledge as the ultimate authority in deciding who has more or less human rights and, by implication, who is more or less human (or, in legal terms, who has personhood). Precisely because medical knowledge is assumed to be ‘evidence-based’, ‘objective’ and ‘factual’, it lends itself readily to being exploited to support opposing and irreconcilable arguments in this debate.
Medical knowledge is key not only because of the physical and mental health risks involved but also because it is appealed to for definitions of when life begins and when it has a right to be protected by law. Even in the most liberal legislation of Argentina, which is couched in carefully inclusive language and explicitly mentions the rights of women and ‘persons with capacity to gestate’, the limitations to such rights are based on health concepts such as ‘viability’.
KNOWIT: Knowledge in Translation
This research group, hosted by the Centre for Sustainable Healthcare Education (SHE), focuses on knowledge translation (KT) in health policy and practice.
We approach KT through the lens of translational medical humanities—an effort to transform insights from culture, ethics, and lived experience into concrete changes in clinical practice. This approach rests on two premises: first, that science alone cannot resolve today’s healthcare challenges; and second, that empathy and compassion are not isolated acts of benevolence but systematic translational practices, where clinical categories and patient narratives are negotiated.
We apply this perspective in projects ranging from co-creating sustainable healthcare models, such as Hospital-at-Home for culturally diverse groups, to advancing narrative competence in health communication and clinical AI.
This group has received funding from the Centre for Advanced Studies at the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters
