SIHI Sweden

Vision

The vision of SIHI Sweden is:

to advocate for social innovation as a means to reduce inequities in health, with a primary focus on marginalized and vulnerable populations.
to promote interdisciplinary research on social innovation for health by connecting researchers, students, entrepreneurs, policymakers and implementers in private and public sector, civil society and non-profits.
to provide support for implementation of research based social innovations by providing mentoring and capacity building for multi-stakeholder collaborations across geographies and sector.
to advocate for systemic shifts needed to achieve sustainable health in the local context.
to be an active partner in the SIHI network, providing input and competencies and promoting international collaboration and knowledge exchange.

The four pillars of SIHI Sweden

SIHI Sweden strives to strengthen co-creation of knowledge and collaborations between researchers, end users and other actors in society in order to increase the pace of implementation of research-based knowledge that addresses complex societal challenges.

Topic of SIHI Sweden Conference 2023.

SIHI Sweden aims to find new or more efficient ways to address complex social challenges in health and welfare through innovations developed together with users and stakeholders in order to provide a more accessible, inclusive and cost-effective health and welfare.

SIHI Sweden aims to develop methods for implementation and scale-up of social innovations in health by focusing on entrepreneurship and intrapreneurship.

Topic of SIHI Sweden Conference 2024.

SIHI Sweden believes that social innovation with a primary focus on marginalised and vulnerable populations is a means to reduce inequities in health.

Topic of SIHI Sweden Conference 2025.

Activities

Annual Conference

SIHI Sweden arranges an annual conference with a focus on different aspects of social innovation in health. Read more about upcoming and previous conferences below.

Exploring Entrepreneurship in Social Innovation for Health

Learn more about the 2024 years conference.

Exploring Community Engagement for Social Innovation in Health

Learn more about 2023 years conference.

PhD Course in Social Innovation

The course aim to provide PhD students with a theoretical basis in social innovation. The course aims to provide insights into conceptual and empirical research in this field. Thematically, social innovation is highlighted in relation to inclusion and sustainability in organizations and society.

About SIHI Sweden

About us

SIHI Sweden was established in 2021 and is a hub in the global network Social Innovation in Health Initiative (SIHI). The hub is hosted by the Centre for Health and Sustainability - CHS, at Uppsala University.

SIHI Sweden aims to conduct and promote interdisciplinary research on social innovation for health by connecting researchers, students, entrepreneurs, policymakers, and implementers in the private and public sector, civil society, and non-profits, and to advocate for systemic shifts needed to achieve health for all.

SIHI Sweden explores and researches ways to promote health for all through social innovation, focusing on implementation processes and transformative learning, to build capacity, co-create knowledge, and transfer social innovations to new contexts.

SIHI Sweden Steering Group

Mats Målqvist

Mats is professor of global health at the Department of Women's and Children's Health. He is the director of the Centre for Health and Sustainability and UUniCORN - Uppsala University Conflicting Objectives Research Nexus at Uppsala University. His teaching and research interests focus on implementation science and health equity, with partner collaborations in in south Asia, eastern Africa and Sweden.

Elin C Larsson

Elin is an associate professor in Global Health, a principal researcher and vice research group leader in the GloSH research group at the Department of Global Public Health, and affiliated to the Dep. of Women’s and Children’s Health, Karolinska Institutet. Her research focus is Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights, both in low- and middle-income contexts. She currently leads a large cluster randomized controlled trial, studying how a quality improvement collaborative with co-produced contraceptive counseling could increase empowerment in contraceptive decision-making. She supervises several Ph.D. students in Sweden and Sub-Saharan Africa and Nepal. As part of her engagement in research and education within SRHR she is part of the management committee of the Academic network for sexual and reproductive health and rights policy, ANSER, and she was recently elected for the Scientific and Technical Advisory Group to the WHOs HRP Programme in SRHR.

Georgina Warner

Georgina is associate professor of child health and welfare at the Department of Public Health and Caring Sciences at Uppsala University. She is a member of the leadership team for the Child Health and Parenting (CHAP) research group. Her research has a particular focus on children with vulnerabilities including disability, emotional and behavioural difficulties, placement in out-of-home care, forced migration, and poverty.

Emma Oljans

Emma is an active researcher within the Centre for Health and Sustainability at Uppsala University. Oljans has a PhD from Uppsala University and did her doctorate in didactics. Her area of expertise includes learning for sustainable development, global health, co-creation, antibiotic resistance and consumer behavior, as well as health literacy.

Maria Nyström

Maria is a coordinator at the Centre for Health and Sustainability (CHS) at Uppsala University and the coordinator of the hub SIHI Sweden. She is a behavioural scientist with a major in social psychology. She has a master’s in Environmental Communication and Management from SLU, the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences in Uppsala.

Linnea Stansert Katzen

Linnea Stansert Katzen has a background in Global Public Health and holds a PhD in Public Health from Stellenbosch University, South Africa. Her research focus include Maternal and Child Health, Community Health Worker programs and Social integration in Sweden, South Africa, and globally. She is currently working as a researcher at Department of Public Health and Community Medicine, Gothenburg University.

Jasmine Arcilla

Jasmine is a current PhD student at Uppsala University and is doing transdisciplinary work under the Centre for Health and Sustainability and Centre for Gender Research. Her current research revolves around how gender structures influence the endemicity of Taenia solium in rural smallholder pig farming communities in Uganda, with specific focuses on Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH) and pig caretaking practices. Prior to her PhD studies, she has also worked as a medical doctor in the Philippines, with her areas of expertise being Public Health and Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights (SRHR).

Linet Mutisya

Linet is a fellow at the Social Innovation in Health Initiative fellowship program and a member of the hub SIHI Sweden hosted at Uppsala University. She has a Master’s in Global Health from Uppsala University. Part-time, she does research focusing on maternal and child health and nutrition. She is passionate about implementation science, community engagement, and health equity. Before her Masters, she worked in Kenya, Uganda, and some parts of Ethiopia, where she implemented several public health projects.

Patricie Arutunanova

Patricie Arutunanova is an intern at SIHI Sweden within the Erasmus+ traineeship programme. She has a bachelor's degree in Biology and she is currently studying a master's programme in Information, Media, and Book Culture at Charles University in Prague, Czechia. Her research interests include health literacy, equity, and sustainability and her diploma thesis focuses on information behavior related to women’s health.

What do we mean by social innovations in health?

SIHI Sweden’s definition of Social Innovation in Health

SIHI Sweden’s definition is based on SIHIs definition by HALPAAP ET AL., 2020:

Social innovations in health are inclusive solutions to address the healthcare delivery gap that meet the needs of end users through a multi-stakeholder, community-engaged process

SIHI Sweden has chosen to broaden the definition that SIHI has and instead of only focusing on health care delivery we propose to focus on human wellbeing.

SIHI Sweden's definition of social innovation in health is: “Social Innovations in Health are inclusive solutions to address complex social challenges in human wellbeing through a multi-stakeholder, community-engaged process”.

We recognize that social innovation adds social value but on top of that SIHI develops the concept further by including co-creation and community-engagement in the process of innovation.

SIHI Fellows

The SIHI fellowship program is a two-year program that provides mentorship, capacity building and collaboration for research in social innovation in health. The fellowship involves a group of participants from different continents who are all young academics. As a part of the fellowship program the fellows will arrange a series of training workshops on topics such as the concept of social innovation, implementation research, human-centered design, crowdsourcing, crowdfunding and monitoring and evaluation of social innovations in health. To learn more about the program, visit the webapage for the SIHI Fellowship program.

Two young academics from SIHI Sweden will take part in the program.

Per Kåks, PhD

Social innovation interests: social innovation in health, implementation research, crowdsourcing, and human-centered design

Ms. Linet M. Mustisya

Social innovation interests: Implementation research, community engagement, sustainability, health promotion, and research dissemination

Contact

Are you interested in collaborating or discussing social innovation in health? Please reach out!
Maria Nyström
Coordinator SIHI Sweden
Follow us on LinkedIn