The Precision Health & Everyday Democracy (PHED) project
Our consortium seeks to address an urgent challenge to society, namely the requirement to better understand how health practitioners and policy-makers can respond to increasing variations in the Swedish population that impact health needs and outcomes. To achieve that goal, the proposed multinational consortium is intended to internationalize the development of:
- precision healthcare tools that are sensitive to the needs of a varied population;
- political science research to identify the social exclusions that undermine precision healthcare and, using democratic theories, to explore the options for ensuring medical practitioners are better equipped to listen and acknowledge variation amongst the individuals they treat; and
- educational modules associated to these research topics. In the long-term perspective, our innovative programme is likely to increase the equality of precision treatment in Sweden, as well as promote the integration and education of new citizens, followed by an improvement in health equity with additional benefits for Sweden.
Recent advances within healthcare and medical research have been uneven globally, but also within nation-states, with the result that there is growing interest in the relevance of both environmental and genomic factors in determining how best to treat patients and ensure a healthy society. At the same time, health has become an increasingly central issue within how societies mark out their borders and internal structures, excluding those without the sufficient residency papers, or segregating access along wealth, racial, or gender lines. In that context, health practitioners have spoken increasingly of ’Precision Health’, meaning greater understanding and collection of data that is sensitive to these disparities so as to better tailor healthcare towards different communities, both to enhance well-being, but counter the worst consequences of societal inequalities.
For more information, please visit our project at Malmö University website.
PHED is a collaboration between Malmö and Lund Universities, and externally financed via the Swedish Foundation for International Cooperation in Research and Higher Education (STINT).