Health Equity through Education for a sustainable society (HEQED)

Project summary

Equity in health and equal rights to health care, are fundamental human rights. Still, we are not yet in a situation where allpeople get the health care they are entitled to. Our current situation with the pandemic is a strong reminder about theinequity in health care. New groups within our societies are emerging with higher risks of poor health and prematuremorbidity. Health care professionals need to understand this and how to reduce the effect of such factors. Therefore, thekey aim of this project is to build competence in health equity in higher education institutions within Europe. We will do this by: 1) Describing a framework for health equity within higher education that can be used to inform and help HEIs (leaders, lecturers) on how to support equity in health in learning experiences and educational programs. 2) For continuous development we will design and build a sustainable space for collaboration between HEIs, NGOs, health care institutionsand individuals. We have called this space the “Virtual HEQED House”. The Virtual HEQED House will be a space for knowledge construction, a resource for sharing of data, educational material, information, and perspectives on equity inhealth. It will be a platform and working space for life-long learning opportunities and experiences, and a connection pointfor future participative research and action initiatives. 3) Providing educational material to support learning in healthequity. 4) Piloting the virtual HEQED house, within educational programs at partner universities. 5) Delivering virtualtraining on equity in health by means of using this collaborative space-. For covering an insight in the constructing and thoughts process we will create an e-book concerning Health equity and our experiences during the project period. 6) Publishing an E-book on health equity through education and health care. Equity is a political concept with a clear moralcommitment to social justice. Equality is, on the other hand, a measured difference. The operationalisation of equity inhealth needs to be constantly discussed and developed. Equity in health is clearly a responsibility of several sectors,educational institutions is one. We are focusing on the role of higher educational institutions, HEIs, for reaching equity inhealth. Especially, we are focusing on educational programs within health care. This is based on the notion thateducational institutions have an explicit responsibility to provide competencies that are relevant to and in our societies.The need to build better competencies is also connected to the UN Sustainable development goals, SDGs, the WHORehabilitation 2030 project, and the European Union and Erasmus+ calls for equal health opportunities for all. Together,these provide a clear direction and necessity for strengthening the work and need for health equity. There is no frameworkor strategy for how to operationalise this within the educational system and educational programs for healthcareprofessionals. The project is based on the notion that contemporary health education depends on continuouscollaboration between HEIs and institutions/organisations that work in relevant clinical and social fields. The consortiumbehind the HEQED project has been working together in other Erasmus+ projects on topics that are related to healthequity. We experience that a close collaboration between educational institutions, NGOs and the clinical fields isnecessary for developing our educational programs in line with local and global changing needs. In the HEQED projectwe want to continue working on what we have started, and develop understanding and competence of health equity within health care education.