Centre for Sustainable Healthcare Education (SHE)
I am the Executive Chair 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 10 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.
SHE aims to develop, implement and disseminate innovative education strategies, conduct translational research (from research to education) on sustainability in medicine, and provide students and healthcare workers with knowledge and skills needed to incorporate sustainability values and principles into comprehensive medical decisions. Its educational activities are designed to raise students’ awareness of how concepts related to the SDGs gain from and might serve many and sometimes conflicting agendas as they find their way from the political to the professional and practical levels of the healthcare system. On the one hand, the SDGs call for immediate change, on the other, they reconcile an economic growth model and a monolithic, top-down, and universalized agenda defined from the point of view of the political establishment and within the dominant political discourse.
In order to serve as change agents, students cannot simply be thought to implement the SDGs as a predefined agenda; they must also learn to depoliticize its concepts and acknowledge that there are different ways of understanding and practicing sustainability.
In order to foster a critical approach to sustainability we draw on and expand a framework of competencies for sustainable development developed by UNESCO and adapt this framework for the use in health professional education.
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.
To do so, we use the Oslo Medical Corpus (OMC), wwhich is a large suite of electronic corpora of medical and medical-related texts currently under construction at the Faculty of Medicine (UiO).
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. Our research spans from theoretical and conceptual analyses to empirical studies of implementation processes.
By investigating ideas and practices of translation in medicine and the humanities we aim to rethink the field of medical humanities. We also develop and expand the understanding and methods of knowledge translation in health care by integrating approaches from natural and human sciences.
This group has received funding from the Centre for Advanced Studies at the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters.