About the Centre for Health Crises

Our vision

A society better prepared for future health crises. 

Our mission

By way of research, education, and interdisciplinary collaboration, we want to contribute to improved preparedness and ability to handle future health crises. 

Our mission is to do so by building the next generation of health crisis experts. We want to make sure that knowledge and proven experience inform policy and plans for the handling of future health crises. 

Focus areas

For the period 2024-2026, we organise our activities around 10 focus areas linked to our strategic objectives. The focus areas relate to education and research, as well as expertise transfer and policy development. Based on our focus areas, we have further crystallised two programme areas, in science to policy, and in education - which we call the Health Crises Academy.

While the focus and programme areas provide clarity and direction, we remain agile, adapting our activities to respond to potential or emerging health crises.

Read more about our focus areas and how we work within them in our work plan:

Areas of expertise

Working on health crises from a broad, interdisciplinary perspective, bringing together expertise in a number of relevant fields, allows us to identify and connect trends, solutions and approaches relevant to health crises at large. This in turn leads to better resource utilisation and contributes to a holistic approach to health crisis preparedness and management.

We have chosen to bring together expertise and experience in a number of areas relevant to health crises, where we see that we can make a particular contribution to the wider community. In each of the areas, we have an expert coordinator, who has long experience, a large network of contacts and good expertise in the area. Our expert coordinators are closely linked to clinical and practical work in different phases of health crises.

Our areas of expertise allow us to have a broad, interdisciplinary skills base at the Centre, they open up opportunities for collaboration and knowledge sharing across agencies. They also enable us to second expertise internationally to ongoing health crises and to strengthen preparedness for future ones. In addition to our expert coordinators, we also have access to expertise through our Health Crises Network.

Currently, our areas of expertise are:

• Emergency surgery – expert coordinator Lisa Strömmer
  The generalist expertise and skills available in emergency and trauma surgery are particularly important in a health crisis, as needs always exceed available resources.
• Extreme weather, climate, and health effects – expert coordinator Petter Ljungman
  Climate change and more frequent extreme weather events, such as heat waves, droughts, etc., pose serious health threats that can create health crises in their own right and exacerbate other types of crises.
• Health system resilience – expert coordinator Helena Nordenstedt
  The vulnerability of a health system, both for the individual and the society, will determine its ability to prepare, manage and learn from a crisis. Building and maintaining robust and resilient health systems is crucial for managing health crises.
• Infectious diseases and vaccine preparedness – expert coordinator Helena Hervius Askling
  Infectious diseases can create serious health crises. Vaccines are an important aspect of preparedness, as is effective case management and implementation of vaccination once a crisis has occurred.
• Critical care with limited resources – expert coordinator Märit Halmin
  In almost all health crises, regardless of how and why they occur, the need for intensive patient care increases, while the conditions for delivering it change. Being able to work with scarce resources therefore becomes an essential skill.
• Chemical and toxicological events– expert coordinator Mattias Öberg
  Accidents and deliberate releases of chemical and toxicological substances are a serious threat to health. Preventing such events and managing them appropriately is crucial for health emergency preparedness.
• Laboratory and diagnostic surge capacity – expert coordinator Jessica Alm
  There is a need for laboratory equipment and diagnostic capacity in many health crises, from infectious diseases to chemical spills. Being able to scale up these activities is an important part of health crisis preparedness.
• Policy and preparedness – expert coordinator Maja Fjaestad
  Health crises occur in a social and societal context, which determines the level of preparedness, how the crisis is managed and the opportunities to learn from it. Therefore, we need to understand these structures and how they can be influenced.
• Outbreak preparedness and response – expert coordinator Hedvig Glans
  Outbreaks of infectious diseases can be difficult, even impossible, to cure and far from all can be prevented by vaccines. Preparing for them and knowing how to deal with them is crucial to prevent an escalating health crisis.

Our definition of a health crisis

We define a health crisis as: A hazardous disruption that causes significant effects on human health and that risks exceeding the health system’s ability to cope.  

The onset, scope and severity of a health crisis is determined by the disruption/threat, the vulnerability of individuals and the health system, and the extent of exposure in a given situation.

Work method

We work according to an 'all hazards' perspective. The WHO defines the ‘all hazards perspective’ as: although health threats may have different origins (natural, man-made), they often affect health systems in similar ways and require a multisectoral response.

To us, this means that while some aspects are specific to a particular type of health crisis, there are also commonalities. We need to understand how health threats and harmful disruptions affect health systems and societies as a whole. These include infectious diseases, climate impacts on health, disaster medicine, trauma, CBRN (chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear elements) and many more.  At the same time, we need to understand what vulnerabilities exist within a given context or health system, the level of exposure to the threat or disruption, and the capacity of the system to respond. The more resilient a health system is, the better it will cope when exposed to a threat, be it an earthquake or a longer-term threat, such as increased antibiotic resistance.

A common aspect of health crises is the need for surge capacity - the ability to scale up. Depending on the type of crisis, this can involve scaling up everything from intensive care to diagnostics.