Key areas of expertise
UNESCO has defined the following key competencies for education for sustainable development:
- Systems thinking: the ability to analyze links between disease/health and the environment, the economy and social conditions.
- Future-oriented thinking: the ability to analyze the potential future consequences of present actions, e.g. the risks involved in overtreatment or anti-microbial resistance.
- Normative thinking: the ability to make difficult moral choices and set priorities.
- Strategic thinking: the ability to supervise and manage others.
- Collaboration: the ability to work in teams across disciplines and in tandem with patients.
- Critical thinking: Critical reflection is a prerequisite for wise decisions. This includes the competence to analyze contradictions underpinning the very concept of sustainability.
- Self-reflection: This is about self-insight with regard to one's own possibilities, development expertise and role.
To introduce our students to these competencies and train them in applying them in health-related decisions, we need realistic, relevant, and complex cases from the health sector that illustrate genuine dilemmas with which decision-makers have to deal.
One of the main ambitions of SHE is thus to develop an open-access electronic database (a sustainability case bank) featuring case descriptions in which the various aspects of sustainability, as well as the above listed competencies, come into play.
We also need to develop methods for cased-based reasoning in teaching settings and to explore how this kind of reasoning is conducted within teams of practitioners.