More Boklöv are needed in health and social care!

Yesterday I attended a welfare technology conference in Oslo on the Nordic region as a welfare technology pioneer. The organizers included the Swedish Engineers and their equivalent organization in Norway, NITO. The starting point was how we at the Nordic level can collaborate and cooperate to, with the help of welfare technology, secure welfare in the future. Because even though the organization and division of responsibilities look different in our countries (both political and administrative), we actually share the same future challenges: demographic trends, skills supply for health and social care, increased costs, etc. etc.

In Denmark, there is a clear consensus that welfare technology improves the quality of health and social care and saves resources (both money and human resources in the form of staff). In 2011, a survey was conducted among the Danish municipalities and of 91 respondents (out of a total of 98), only five responded that they were not working with any form of welfare technology solution/innovation at all. This means that 86 were actively working on implementing welfare technology in health and social care. That's an impressive figure. And a figure that I am convinced is largely due to the strong political clarity from the Danish side. Both Danish and Norwegian politicians have stated that we do not solve tomorrow's problems with tomorrow's solutions. Or as Kåre Hagen of the Norwegian Institute for Research on Growth, Welfare and Ageing put it: "we need more people like Boklöv in health and social care. In other words, more people who dare to think in new ways and break away from the best practice we use today."

Jonas Gahr Støre, Norway's Minister of Health and Care Services, who attended the conference, also emphasized the importance of not only engineers and the IT industry pushing for change. The health and care sector must also seriously step up and start engaging in how we can ensure the welfare of tomorrow. Or as he put it: "welfare technology is about both work culture and infrastructure." I couldn't agree more, and hopefully we can get commitment to these issues through our Arena för Välfärdsteknolgi-initiative.

Our own Minister for Children and the Elderly, Maria Larsson, did not participate in the conference but stated, via a recorded video message, that "we cannot use yesterday's solutions to solve tomorrow's problems" and that there is a "fantastic potential for welfare technology". We can only hope that this statement will have consequences in terms of political action and initiatives. Maria Larsson, why not, together with your Nordic ministerial colleagues, give the Nordic Welfare Center the task of identifying the obstacles to the implementation of welfare technology at Nordic level? As I said, we share the same future challenges and should also reasonably have a lot of experience to share. It's just about the will. The will to change. The will to think in new ways. The will to be a Book Leaf.