Anneli Eriksson

Research problem and specific questions: Sweden’s emergency preparedness has met several acute challenges in the past years, now in the form of the COVID-19 pandemic. The pandemic has shocked the society, including the Swedish health system. There remains little empirical evidence on how health systems can remain resilient when exposed to shocks, but tested and trained emergency preparedness plans appear to be crucial elements. To be prepared for future shocks it is essential to systematically compile, assess and analyze to what extent emergency preparedness plans were adequate and have been implemented during the pandemic. The purpose of this project is therefore to assess the implementation and effectiveness of regional emergency preparedness plans in Sweden during COVID-19, so that Sweden will learn from the pandemic to build resilience of the Swedish health system for future shocks.Data and methods: The project is based on four individual studies that all apply different, well established research methods to study the Swedish emergency preparedness during the pandemic. Qualitative methods (interviews, Delphi panel) and systems thinking methods (Group Model Building) will be used to capture experiences from key stakeholders of the regional emergency preparedness plans and management of the pandemic. In addition, quantitative methods will be used to assess potential differences between the regional preparedness plans and how they may have affected provision of health care.Plan for project realization: The main applicant will lead the project together with one of the co-applicants. A doctoral student will be recruited for the project to further develop the research plan and perform most of the project work. Due to the nature of the proposed project, the budget costs in this application are mainly salary costs. The research group recently received funding from Karolinska Institutet, a doctoral training grant, in October 2021 for this project.Relevance: To develop emergency preparedness within the Swedish health system is key to be able to meet future health shocks, mitigate their effects and for recovery after the emergency has passed. This project aims to generate new knowledge on emergency preparedness from lessons learnt from the COVID-19 pandemic and thereby support decision makers to develop more resilient health systems for the future.

Armed conflict is human development in reverse. The full extent of the problem remains unknown, however, and fragmentation of research into multiple academic fields limits our understanding. This multi-disciplinary program brings together scholars from economics, epidemiology, political science, and conflict research to study the effects of armed conflict in much more detail and comprehensiveness than earlier studies. It takes a risk-analysis perspective, seeing the expected impact as a function of hazard, exposure, and vulnerability, and consider effects at both the macro and micro level, on economies, health, water security, political institutions, human rights, forced migration, and gender equality. Hazard will be modeled through an early-warning system, expanding the well-established ViEWS system, to alert observers to particularly detrimental occurrences of violence. We will model exposure to conflict events by accounting for how effects of violence are transmitted to locations far from the violence itself and over time. We will also identify conditions that make local populations and institutions particularly vulnerable to the effects, and how conflict increases local populations' vulnerability to other shocks such as natural disasters. Throughout, the program will study how the various impacts and vulnerabilities identified work to reinforce each other, and formulate policy recommendations for parties seeking to reduce the impact of armed conflict on human development.