How can we strengthen crisis preparedness and welfare resilience in the Nordic region with a focus on healthcare? How can we better understand and analyse challenges and opportunities to make better decisions? The financial crisis, pandemic, war and environmental and climate threats of recent years show that the global risk landscape is evolving rapidly and that the threats to our societies are becoming increasingly interconnected and complex.
Experiences from the COVID-19 pandemic show that crisis preparedness and resilience within welfare are crucial, both for good and equal health outcomes and for the functioning of society in general. At the same time, the challenges facing the welfare state are considerable. The need for welfare services, particularly in healthcare, is increasing at a rate that means there are not enough workers to meet demand. The demographic challenges of increasing life expectancy and an ageing population are evident throughout the Nordic region.
Availability of skilled labour is therefore one of the biggest challenges facing the welfare state. Increased recruitment is needed, but so are better conditions to ensure that those already working in healthcare remain in their jobs. Issues related to the organisation, management and coordination of the welfare state are key, as the supply of skilled labour involves many different actors across a number of levels (Vold Hansen, Bjørkquist & Jerndahl Fineide, 2023).
Both the problem statement and analysis need to include a gender perspective. Otherwise, we risk missing important pieces of the puzzle in building future welfare resilience. Many professions in the healthcare sector are female dominated and specialisations are gender divided. Salaries are generally low compared to male-dominated professions with similar educational and skill requirements. In addition, perceptions of both needs and skills within the sector are strongly gendered, further reinforcing the gender-segregated labour market. The healthcare provided is also unequal. There are significant regional variations in access to healthcare and differences in how women’s and men’s healthcare needs are met. In the long run, this risks exacerbating vulnerabilities in healthcare during future crises.
Lessons learned from the COVID-19 pandemic show that crisis management went hand in hand with the development of knowledge. At the same time, it became clear that applying past lessons to new crisis situations is challenging. The Nordic Council of Ministers has therefore taken the initiative to produce this publication, developed by NIKK, Nordic Information on Gender, based at the Swedish Secretariat for Gender Research, University of Gothenburg. In the publication, researchers in global public health, economic history, demography, sociology and social work contribute reflections and problematisations in four essays. Based on their research findings, they open up new perspectives, questions and possible solutions for future crises. The other texts in the publication are written by Angelica Simonsson, a researcher in education and analyst at the Swedish Secretariat for Gender Research. The report was originally written in Swedish and subsequently translated into English.
Method
The starting point for this publication is to reflect on welfare resilience from the perspective of healthcare in future crises grounded in research-based knowledge from a gender perspective. Applying a gender perspective serves to complement an otherwise incomplete analysis, supplementing it with patterns, conditions and needs that would be missed in the absence of such a perspective. It offers a way to compensate for and counteract gaps and shortcomings that would otherwise result in inadequacies, inefficiencies and potentially weaker resilience.
At the same time, this is a vast field that encompasses an incalculable number of approaches, subjects of study and perspectives. This publication does not claim to cover the entire potential field. Instead, the aim is to bring perspectives on gender and resilience closer together and to include some concrete examples. Bringing together texts by several researchers is an attempt to frame the issue of welfare resilience in a new way and to stimulate discussion between fields and perspectives that would otherwise not meet. The aim is to encourage practice, policy and research to explore further questions at the intersection of gender and resilience with regard to welfare.
Application procedure and assignment
How did this publication come to be? Why was it written by these particular researchers and why did they write it in essay form?
In the spring of 2024, NIKK issued an open call for doctoral students and postdoctoral researchers, who were encouraged to write an essay based on their previous research. The purpose of the publication: to contribute to increased knowledge to better understand and analyse the challenges and thereby provide a better foundation from which to make decisions that strengthen crisis preparedness and increase welfare resilience in the Nordic region. The call for papers was widely promoted by NIKK. Targeted mailings were also sent to specific research environments and individual researchers identified as relevant to the subject. The purpose of this broad call was to encourage interest among researchers across different fields, partly to gather different, new and urgent perspectives and partly to bring these into dialogue with each other.