Through an open call, the project “Welfare resilience in future crisis in the Nordic region” brings together experts from different research fields, who will highlight aspects of welfare health care in the Nordic region in a joint publication for good future preparedness. The call was aimed at researchers and doctoral students working in the Nordic region.
Welfare work takes time – let it do so. For nurses working in female-dominated healthcare professions in Sweden, working hours have become a major challenge. Increasing workloads and the difficulty of combining paid and unpaid work is a challenge for women. Some of the biggest challenges for the future of the health sector are attracting and retaining skilled labour, reducing high levels of sickness absence and staff turnover, and creating a more sustainable temporal solution in and outside working life.
This essay explores what nurses and social workers dream of when it comes to organising their working time. It highlights women’s knowledge and experiences to create practices that enable resilience in the health sector. Focusing on best practices, the essay will analyse what works at work and what workers themselves perceive as temporal practices that are not only sustainable but perhaps even enjoyable.
The essay draws on research on healthcare workers and on invisible labour.
Researcher: Paula Mulinari, Department of social work, Malmö University
The Nordic countries have among the oldest populations in the world. Women live longer than men, seeking more primary care while men seek more hospital care, women are more likely to reduce their working hours to care for elderly relatives, and most employees in the care sector are women. Caring for older adults is often considered a low-status job. During and after the COVID-19 pandemic, questions have been raised about shortcomings in the organisation of care for older adults. Studies of the Nordic care systems for this group have shown that decentralised care systems lead to significant local variations that can jeopardise equity in care.
This essay explores how sharing experiences from the COVID-19 pandemic across the Nordic countries can facilitate the organisation of care for older adults. It emphasises the importance of using existing evidence in daily work and during a crisis. The essay points out that policy makers at the national level need to take into account local and regional differences and challenges in the Nordic decentralised care systems to prevent health and care inequalities in future crises.
The essay draws on research on the care of older adults in the Nordic countries and care choice reforms.
Researchers: Ann Liljas & Bo Burström, Department of Global Public Health, Karolinska Institutet
Privatisation of health care provision and financing has increased in all the Nordic countries, but the privatisation processes differ between the countries. In Sweden, privatisation is manifested, for example, in the rapid growth of private health insurance. Private health insurance is intertwined with the public system and this type of parallel health care system can be studied as an example of the so-called hidden welfare state.
This essay will describe the extent of the parallel health care system in the Nordic countries and discuss some implications of this for the public systems, in terms of trust and resilience. The focus will be on questions of how policyholders are distributed in terms of age, class and gender, and how private health insurance affects the resilience of the public healthcare system in each country. The essay argues that private health insurance makes the public system less resilient in many ways, while also having a gender aspect attached to it.
The essay draws on research on private health insurance.
Researcher: John Lapidus, Department of economy and society, University of Gothenburg
In times of crisis, there are a number of measures that will be taken in Sweden. Among other things, the general duty to serve may be activated. For people in key positions, which are crucial for the continued functioning of society, wartime assignment will be activated. This obligation applies to a large proportion of health care workers. The wartime assignment system dates back to the Second World War and the labour market of that time, when men were usually assigned to wartime duties while women were expected to be responsible for childcare. The system is based on the idea that there are two parents responsible for children, of which only one is a wartime deployed parent.
The essay discusses whether the wartime assignment system is problematic in today’s two-parent society and with today’s family constellations. In most families, there are two working adults and there is a risk that both have a wartime assignment. For example, many doctors in Sweden live with another doctor or a nurse. The essay asks questions about the consequences and possible problems this system may have for health care in future crises. The essay aims to point out vulnerabilities in strategies based on unrealistic gender assumptions.
The essay draws on research on parental leave and childcare, and risk and crisis communication.
Researchers: Ann-Zofie Duvander & Minna Lundgren, Department of humanities and social sciences, Mid Sweden University