MED-nytt spoke to the Faculty's enthusiastic, enterprising new Head of Unit Eivind Engebretsen. He is the head of the Faculty's new "Sustainable Health Unit (SUSTAINIT)", a knowledge cluster consisting of three centres: Centre for Sustainable Healthcare Education (SHE), the Centre for Global Health, and the newly established Pandemic Centre, the latter to be launched at the end of March/beginning of April. SUSTAINIT aims to highlight challenges, initiate debate and propose sustainable solutions in relation to a range of global and local health issues.
"The UN’s approval in 2015 of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) marked a shift towards a more comprehensive, fair and integrated approach to health. Health is an issue around which all the SDGs come into play. Health is linked to poverty, environment/pollution, war/peace. Health is something that concerns much more than just the health sector. Human and planetary health are interrelated. We can use health as a prism for discussing the SDGs," says Professor Engebretsen.
2023 SDG Conference
The UiO was responsible for organising this year's national SDG Conference, which is held in Bergen each year. The conference provided an excellent platform for launching SUSTAINIT. Under the leadership of Eivind Engebretsen and Beate Sjåfjell (head of the Sustainability Law research group), the theme of the conference went right to the core of SUSTAINIT's mandate. Attended by many important key figures in politics, research, environmental activism and trade and industry, the conference provided a rare opportunity for initiating important debates and raising new questions about the subject of a “Just Transformation".
"Part of the agenda of the conference was to raise important questions such as whether the SDGs are what we need in order to achieve sustainable development". The discussion about sustainability does not just concern the climate, but also health and the economy, among other important themes. For example, what happens when we roll out renewable energy programmes in low-income countries? Large swathes of the population, especially people on low incomes, could be forced to move, which in turn results in changing settlement patterns and ultimately creates health problems.”
Read more on this in Engebretsen's Blog: 2023 SDG Conference Bergen and view the programme on the conference website.
SUSTAINIT well underway
"We have already received external funding," says the newly appointed Head of Unit proudly. "Among other things, we have received just over NOK 5 million from UiO: Life Sciences, to be used as seed funding for interfaculty research groups administered by our new Pandemic Centre. These funds will be used primarily to free up researchers at the UiO so that they can have the opportunity to work on pandemic issues within a cross-disciplinary research group.
SUSTAINIT will further offer courses and programmes on sustainable health through SHE and the Centre for Global Health. It will also build a database of groups that are conducting research on sustainability in a health-related context and bring people together in networks to support the initiation of important new projects.
"In short, SUSTAINIT will be a knowledge centre for the Faculty that provides scholarships and seed funding for projects, organises meetings, student groups and events and provides support for various learning initiatives on the topic of sustainability and health," says Professor Engebretsen. "This summer we are organising summer schools with Circle U. We will be responsible for one summer school in collaboration with the Department of Political Science, and I am also contributing to the summer school being held in Paris," he continues.
Just before Christmas, SUSTAINIT also received NOK 6 million in funding from UiO:Democracy for a research project on global health, which will be led by the Head of Unit himself and will examine the debates about abortion and related issues. "Among other things, we will be looking at how medical knowledge is mobilised and addressed in debates about abortion by different stakeholders in three different countries: the USA, Ireland and Argentina," says Eivind Engebretsen. "As resources for the project, we will be using the large database of documents that we have developed at SHE, the Oslo Medical Corpus (OMC) (link in Norwegian). OMC contains numerous texts from a range of genres (political documents, articles, press and blog material) on various medical topics that can be used to support teaching and research.
Gathering input for SUSTAINIT strategy
The process of putting a strategy in place for SUSTAINIT is already well underway. The aim is for this to be completed by the summer in order to begin implementing the strategy in August. Prof. Engebretsen has outlined the main concept underpinning the knowledge cluster SUSTAINIT in his blog: What is the Sustainable Health Unit (SUSTAINIT)? For more information, please contact SUSTAINIT.
A pioneering model
"SUSTAINIT has been strongly supported by the rector’s office as an initiative that fits in well with UiO's overall strategy," says Prof. Engebretsen. "Connecting a number of larger centres to form a knowledge cluster could serve as a model for several new units at the UiO, which could eventually join forces in order to support the UiO's future Sustainability House," he continues.
Eivind Engebretsen is a member of the working group tasked with establishing a Sustainability House at the UiO that will serve as a "catalyst for strengthened interdisciplinary research, education and outreach on sustainability at the UiO. The Head of Unit has great faith in what we at the UiO can achieve by engaging in interdisciplinary work. We are already witnessing the synergic effects of collaboration in the newly established SUSTAINIT cluster. One group affiliated with SHE has now applied for projects from the Research Council of Norway for the Pandemic Centre. "We realise the benefits of seeing things in context. The Centre for Global Health has been working for a long time with the Lancet Commission for One Health. This thematic area is now being moved to the Pandemic Centre. We share projects and insights with each other in order to create synergies.”
