Interdisciplinary collaboration between health and business (03.04.2025)

Norway faces a demographic challenge with an increasing proportion of elderly people and relatively fewer working-age individuals to care for them. This creates a need for more efficient, high-quality health and social services. Interdisciplinary collaboration is key to addressing these challenges. Business actors will be important partners in developing innovative solutions within welfare technology, nutrition, physical activity, and a range of other areas.

How can collaboration between the business sector and health and social services help address the challenges of increasing service demands and a shortage of healthcare workers in the near future? In spring 2025, a TVEPS group will take a closer look at the advantages and disadvantages of this very issue.

In this assignment – consisting of two sub-tasks – the student group will explore:

• How collaboration between the business sector and health and social services can help meet the challenges of increasing service demands and fewer healthcare workers in the near future. You should identify relevant business actors, provide examples of effective types of collaboration, and assess potential advantages and disadvantages (including ethical considerations) of such partnerships.
• How TVEPS can help build bridges for increased collaboration between the business sector and municipal health and social services. You should identify study programs that would be beneficial to include alongside the professional programs that already have TVEPS practice integrated into their curricula. Furthermore, you should outline a proposal for a TVEPS practice that can foster collaboration between business and health and social services while providing valuable learning opportunities for students.

You should use nursing homes as the main example of municipal health and social services, but you are welcome to include ideas for collaboration in other areas of primary healthcare as well.

Mandatory meetings for this group:

• Kick-off meeting:
  April 28, 2025, 16:30–18:00 (digital via Zoom)
• Investigation:
  May 5, 2025, 09:00–16:00
  (Meeting room, Alrek Health Cluster, Årstadveien 17, Bergen)
• Dialogue meeting:
  May 23, 2025, 1.5 hours (digital via Teams)

REMEMBER: TVEPS is estimated at approximately 20 hours of total work per student. Any additional meetings beyond those listed above will be agreed upon by the group.

More about:
TVEPS practice step by step | TVEPS
TVEPS digital challenge bank

The health and social sector faces a range of complex issues that require an interprofessional perspective to solve. By creating an action plan to address this challenge, you will learn interprofessional collaboration while helping to improve primary healthcare services. Your solution will be presented in a dialogue meeting with representatives from the services and a facilitator from TVEPS. Use the professional and personal knowledge you bring to the group, be creative, and think outside the box as you develop an action plan for the challenge outlined in this challenge card. Each of you holds valuable knowledge that can illuminate and solve parts of the problem – combine this into a holistic solution.