Health education in the future? – discussion of facts

Published Date: 08-12-2022 – 12.12

Chronicle: Tren Johansson MesaDirector of Christiania College
Hans Christian UchemDean of the College of Health Sciences, Høyskolen Kristiania

no thing Discuss – or doubt – that one of the key to Norway’s future demographic challenges lies in the education sector. Obviously we need more doctors, nurses and other traditional health professions, but the large influx of older people into the health sector, with its many diagnoses and treatment needs, will require new solutions, innovation, regulation and possibly also new professions in the sector.

We must dare to ask whether more traditional healers will achieve the goals 25-35 years from now. It’s urgent.

Technology effect. Most people who start their health education now will be employed in 2060. By that time, the proportion of the population over the age of 70 will have doubled. Many people today wonder what kind of working conditions should we offer to those who are going to keep our publicly funded health care?

These are the topics faced by the Health Workers Committee, which will present its report this fall. to me Committee mandate “How innovation through digitalization, technology and new forms of work, among other things, can affect the future need of employees and contribute to sustainability, and what is required to use these opportunities across the country” should be investigated.

In its projection of the labor market, Statistics Norway has also seen an increase in groups with a different educational background than traditional ones, and believes that this trend will continue.

Public Health. This is why two health colleges have initiated an educational seminar during Arendal Week. The Oslo Met offers education in most health professions, and has, among other things, the largest nursing education in the country. Høyskolen Kristiania also has great breadth in its educational offering, which primarily focuses on preventative health – and non-pharmacological treatment.

The common denominator between the two institutions is public health in the broad sense, not least in connection with prevention and interdisciplinary collaboration. Our future investment will be within this broad field. We are working, at a minimum, to professionalize and research the health-promoting professions that do not currently have a license. An example of this is training to become a personal trainer (PT).

When it comes to osteopathic medicine, Christiana has been a champion for licensing this profession, and getting approved for it.

why? OECD report “Health Quick Look” (2021) show that we spend less on preventive health services in the Nordic countries. Many have pointed out that public health often originates outside the health sector. The task of the health workers committee should therefore be to contribute to a holistic vision of health and to make room for new approaches. If the Commission – and later the government – pursues such an initiative, it is bound to have a significant impact on the education sector in the years to come.

What, then, is the background to why such a way of thinking has not gained traction long ago? Two possible reasons can be indicated: the occupational struggle and the structure of the state budget. Our solution is to build bridges from traditional professions to prevention and new forms of treatment. But without following it up in the public budgets, that would be difficult.

Common sense? in daily magazine On July 24, 2022, Ståle Sagabråten, president of the Medical Syndicate’s Professional Council, claimed that documenting exercise as a health measure “is unable to match the documentation that pharmaceutical companies provide to the market and include in their guidelines for treating a number of conditions”.

In the subsequent discussion in the aftermath of the feature, admittedly, after much criticism, Sagabråten clarified the statement. What remains after the word change, however, is the need to emphasize stronger academic and empirical foundations for the physical activity content that clinicians “prescribe”. Within research in this area specifically, new preventive approaches are essential to solving tomorrow’s health challenges. For example, one of our worst general illnesses, the obesity epidemic, is difficult to solve without a major effort in research into nutrition and physical exercise.

Saying that we need a comprehensive approach to prevention/early intervention is not, after all, a revolution. It’s just a matter of using – and organizing – what we all know is “common sense”; In the long run, it is more beneficial to reduce patient queues than to treat them.

No declared conflict of interest