Helsinki — A Great Place to Die?

How do you understand aging, participation, and open government? This spring,
our class is exploring how Finland’s commitment to open governance supports older citizens as
active participants in society. In this blog, we’ll discuss key aspects of our research, including
language alignment, challenges of meaningful participation, and the strengths and limitations of
incremental policy change.

The First Page of our Elderly Care Notebook

In our project, we analyze Finland’s elderly health and social care system, mapping key actors, services, and data flows. With the Ministry of Social Affairs and Health and Kela, we investigate how patient information is managed, where gaps exist, and how better information sharing could enhance elderly care.

Reinstating for the Better

Our group identified excessive administrative burdens on Finland’s public healthcare professionals as a major obstacle to quality of care for patients. We beleive that reintroducing medical assistants to handle non-medical tasks should recuduce this obstacle. However, to do so, we have to convince our partners of the necessity and cost-efficiency of this reinstatement by speaking their language.

Rooted in Values

This blog post reports on work-in-progress within the DfG course! The post is written by group 1C dealing with the Prime Minister’s Office and Ministry of Environment’s brief on ‘Mainstreaming Biodiversity’. The group includes Dinah Coops and Anna Halvorsen from Creative Sustainability program, Sari Kukkasniemi from Collaborative and Industrial Design program, and Thao Nguyen from … Read more

Finding a Common Vision and Entry Points: “The struggle to comprehend the basic starting point.”

The third blog post from group 2A is focused on the research process of our project on continuity of care in primary healthcare. This project has been developed in collaboration with Kela and the Ministry of Social Affairs and Health. The blog post showcases the current process of the project and discusses more deeply the process of the vision and entry points.