Wake up with Skåne Innovation Week: Moving from sick care to health care

This keynote is part of “Wake up with Skåne Innovation Week”. Each morning at 08.00-08.45 AM, we kick off with a hybrid live-streamed event, focusing on development, research, innovation, system thinking and possible futures. Join us online or IRL at The Tivoli in Helsingborg!

In these recent decades, we focused on the transformation from industrial to knowledge societies. If we want to build knowledge societies, the human capital is to become our focus, which in turn requires more holistic investments into better life conditions. Healthy people, healthy communities, healthy societies are essential to build embracing, inclusive societies.

There’s a need to focus on health as an investment and not as a cost. It plays into the logic of well-being economy, the concept on the rise. But it also means that we would need to focus on health on a much wider scope then in the very narrow clinical sense that is being budgeted for today. That is why we at Copenhagen Institute for Future Studies, have developed the 50/50 approach. It means that by 2030 half of the healthcare resources should go towards prevention, including secondary and tertiary prevention, not just primary.

The real question is not if we can afford future costs of healthcare services, but if we can afford not to invest in keeping people healthy for as long as possible. The societal goal is to have a population that is as healthy as possible and have a health system that supports that. It is not necessary to have a healthcare system that treats most complicated and advanced diseases best of all.

Speaker:
Bogi Eliasen is Director of Health, Copenhagen Institute for Futures Studies. The Institute was founded in 1969 on initiative by former Finance Minister and OECD Secretary-General, Professor Thorkil Kristensen. Today the Institute is a global leader in applying futures studies methods to solve strategic challenges within organisations.