About us

The ambition within the Division of Social Medicine at KI is to continue to be a national and international leading and driving force in research, education and applied knowledge that promotes better health in general and, in particular, among groups with socially and economically weak resources.

The research groups are internationally successful in terms of external funding, publication, dissemination of knowledge, and implementation of activities. Organized support should therefore be guaranteed to support the groups continued work on further developing the positions they have already achieved. Most of the groups collaborate with internationally leading research teams or individual researchers, and several have responsibility for running various global health-policy strategies, e.g. within the confines of WHO.

Several groups (e.g. those concerned with child and adolescent health, and social epidemiology) have established collaboration with adjacent departments within KI, such as the Department of Medical Epidemiology and Biostatistics (MEB). Through its research groups and the basic/undergraduate education it offers, the Division of Social Medicine also collaborates with the Swedish National Institute of Public Health, the Swedish Rescue Services Agency, and several international organizations and NGOs. In terms of local organization, all eleven research groups have colleagues employed at either KI or SLL. Thus, there is experience from a long time back of working together at different levels. This also applies within undergraduate education, which is something to be conserved in light of the imminent reorganization of activities.

Some of the areas that need to be strengthened or developed for the future are as follows:

1. The Division of Social Medicine will from now on take substantial responsibility for the education of Swedish students, and also students from low-income countries with major public-health problems. Extra investments will therefore be required to increase the number of English-language Masters programs.

2. The experience and logistics built up for tele-education will be used to give priority to students who cannot finance their education on site, but need to study at a distance.

3. A large segment of the researchers at the Division are engaged as teachers and supervisors in basic and undergraduate education. This applies to both the physicians program and the programs in the public health sciences. Accordingly, increased collaboration with the County Council in the arena of public-health activities is expected in general to provide good opportunities to reinforce the numbers of teachers and supervisors.

4. Basic and undergraduate education needs to be strengthened when it comes to instruction concerning global environment problems and the role public-health specialists are expected to play in local work for sustainable development.

5. A neglected area is education and research in patient safety. In the investigations underpinning the Patient Directive of 2007, emphasis is placed on the importance of strengthening the competence of personnel, and of reviewing rules and regulations and their supervision. In the World Alliance for Patient Safety, which contains WHO guidelines, there is a further emphasis on the need for educational efforts aimed at personnel and for functioning reporting systems for risks and mistakes. The model lies in safety work within civil aviation, where a clear organization and system perspective is applied. The aim is to raise the level of expertise, thereby contributing to modernization of work on patient safety.

6. The core of social medicine consists in treating health and equality as a key component of community-welfare research. Several groups in the Division lie on the frontline of research with regard to the development of theory and analytic tools. An increased investment in intervention research, with an emphasis on integration and exclusion, is judged to be important. In this area, there is also consideration of how changes in various economic support systems affect income distribution and health and access to healthcare, and also how organizational changes in the healthcare system impact on social differences in healthcare utilization.

7. An increased investment in research into the significance of public-health policy for local processes of change is required; this should include identification of the contextual barriers to the establishment of longer-term, functioning programs that support environments for health and sustainable development.

8. There is a need for increased and more efficient collaboration between the research groups in order to stimulate new, boundary-transcending issues and hypotheses.

9. More resources are required for research and education on the application of the theories and methods of health economics to work in public health and healthcare, including the making-available of resources for the fresh recruitment of health economists with research expertise.

10. There should be increased investment in research into how the shaping of society impacts on individuals health at different stages of the life course, and the ways in which it contributes to the creation of unequal health conditions. The subject area encompasses two of the current frontlines in international social-epidemiologic research. The Division of Social Medicine has already conducted major research in the area, within several of its groups, and such research is also being performed by others in the region, including the Centre for Health Equity Studies (CHESS), with whom several of the Divisions researchers work in close collaboration.

11. There is a need, in conjunction with others, to build up databases that can serve the need of future research for easily available data that combine information in registers with miscellaneous data from individuals who participate in various ways. The required size of these databases demands investments in excess of what individual research groups are capable of coping with. The recently created Public Health Cohort, with around 65,000 participants, is a building stone in the development.