On 10 December, it was announced that the Centre for Health Crises will receive 3 million Norwegian kroner in funding from the Nordic Council of Ministers' research funding body, Nordforsk. The funding will go towards a project to create a Nordic health crisis network. The funding is based on a call for proposals in the area of preparedness and resilience. that the Centre, together with partners in other Nordic countries.
The project is a collaboration between the Centre for Health Crises here at Karolinska Institutet, and University of Copenhagen , Roskilde University , University of Stavanger , Hanken School of Economics in Finland and University of Iceland . The collaboration between the six universities is to some extent an extension of a previous project on research and collaboration during the COVID-19 pandemic. The partners will now build a Nordic Health Crises Network, with the aim of strengthening the interaction between science and policy in health crises, thereby creating collaborations that strengthen the role of universities in building crisis preparedness in the Nordic countries for future health crises.
The idea of a Nordic health crisis network is inspired by the Health Crises Network at Swedish universities, that the Centre for Health Crises initiated in 2023. The aim is to contribute to health care preparedness for health crises through research, education, policy and expert support.
Nordic benefits and interdisciplinary knowledge generation
In its motivation for awarding the funding, Nordforsk writes that 'The project aims to generate collaborations to improve the link between universities and policy practitioners in the field of health crises'. Nordforsk also states that the project has high potential to create benefits for the Nordic research community in the field.
"We are so pleased that Nordforsk has chosen to support our project. Interdisciplinary knowledge generation and collaboration between researchers, policy makers and decision makers are crucial for creating preparedness and improving the management of future health crises, and that's exactly what we want the network to contribute to", says Caroline de Groot, collaboration coordinator at the Centre for Health Crises, who coordinated the application.
A number of activities are already planned as part of the project, including workshops and PhD student exchanges, but first a mapping of existing initiatives and actors in the Nordic region in the field will begin.
