Meet Ewa-Lena Bratt, Vice Dean for Internationalization, Collaboration, and Sustainability

LEADERSHIP MISSION. People need to meet to understand each other. That’s a clear message from Ewa-Lena Bratt, who is new to the position of Vice Dean for Internationalization, Collaboration, and Sustainability. She takes on the role in close collaboration with the other vice deans.

Ewa-Lena Bratt is a professor of nursing with a focus on care in acute and critical conditions. At the Institute of Health and Care Sciences, she leads a research group, Care during transitions in healthcare, which focuses on improving the transition from pediatric to adult healthcare for children and young people with chronic illnesses.

Heart in nursing

She is also a pediatric nurse, a profession she loves. For over thirty years, she has worked in pediatric healthcare, primarily with children and young people with heart conditions. She now devotes part of her clinical role to contributing to various educational initiatives and implementing new research findings in clinical care, as well as undertaking various leadership tasks. She also finds time to work clinically as a pediatric nurse at the Pediatric Cardiology Center ward at Queen Silvia Children’s Hospital.

“It’s a privilege to come in and work as part of a team, where I get to meet families and my colleagues. I also sometimes encounter our nursing students who are out on clinical placements. It startles them! ‘Time for an unprepared examination you didn’t know about!I use to joke with them,'” laughs Ewa-Lena.

I meet Ewa-Lena Bratt at Hälsovetarbacken where she has her workplace. Her vice dean assignment in internationalization, collaboration, and sustainability intersects greatly with the responsibilities of other vice deans: doctoral education, research, and education. Therefore, she will carry out the assignment in collaboration with the management group, something she looks forward to.

Priority Goals

Regarding collaboration, Magnus Simrén, as Pro Dean, is largely responsible for our contacts with both Chalmers University of Technology and Sahlgrenska University Hospital.

“Magnus has already invited me to some of the collaboration forums where Sahlgrenska Academy needs representation, such as our increasing collaboration with Chalmers and with other external actors in society and the business sector,” says Ewa-Lena Bratt.

Since internationalization is part of all the other vice deans’ assignments, she will collaborate with them to develop prioritized goals and strategic initiatives for internationalization concerning education, doctoral education, and research.

Ewa-Lena gives some examples:

With Mats Brännström, Vice Dean for Research, she wants, for example, to discuss how we can increase opportunities to attract and hire more visiting professors, as well as improve opportunities for postdocs and explore possibilities for sabbaticals for more senior researchers.

“Such initiatives naturally revolve around resources and funding,” comments Ewa-Lena.

Together with Mia Ericson, Vice Dean for Doctoral Education, Ewa-Lena Bratt intends to work, among other things, to increase opportunities for doctoral students to be accepted as double degree or joint degree candidates, where the thesis is presented at our university and at another institution in Sweden or abroad.

“All collaboration to increase doctoral students’ opportunities to broaden their education and thus their perspective outside the local research group, I believe, is enriching,” says Ewa-Lena and continues:

“At the basic and advanced education levels, I believe we should continue to increase collaboration between programs and across departmental boundaries. This is to increase the possibility of accepting more incoming international students. There are already many courses at SA that are taught in English, and more will be added. This work is done in collaboration with Vice Dean Gudmundur Johannsson and all those responsible for internationalization in each program and department. I have many new contacts to establish.”

Internationalization for many

Internationalization is important to broaden people’s perspectives and to understand the world. Here, we must also move away from the view that internationalization is a form of charity and instead cultivate mutual exchange of experiences with our partners around the world, believes Ewa-Lena:

“Meeting people living different lives under different conditions inspires new solutions. I was very impressed myself when I visited South Africa a few years ago and saw the smart solutions they had to fully utilize the scarce resources they had access to, as it was necessary for healthcare to function,” she explains.

Of the three areas included in her vice dean assignment, she has so far the most experience in internationalization, which she has worked on at all levels as both a researcher and a teacher. Together with her colleagues Louise Freytag and Camilla Eide, she developed the course Nursing Care in Complex Care Situations, work that in 2019 earned them the Swedish Medical Faculties’ Prize for Internationalization. The course is entirely taught in English in the fifth semester of the nursing program to include incoming exchange students in regular teaching.

Joy of incoming students

Overall, Ewa-Lena Bratt believes that there is much to gain from developing what she calls “internationalization at home.”

“Only a fraction of our students get to experience the opportunity to conduct part of their education in another country, but when we receive visits from incoming students, more of our own students can also gain international experience without having to travel. These students can talk about how the healthcare system works in their countries, what their education looks like, and what challenges exist in healthcare in their home countries. Often, you discover that there are more similarities than differences,” she says. Here, she believes there may be synergies to be found within the faculty.

“We have many teachers who are passionate about internationalization, and I know that Sahlgrenska Academy as a whole has a well-functioning operation in the field. I also know that I need to become more familiar with how internationalization works within other institutions and how other organizations have chosen to structure their work, and I am humble about that.”

She adds that she has tremendous support in the Sahlgrenska Academy International Office (SAIO), a unit within the faculty office with extensive experience and expertise.

New responsibility area

The third responsibility area, sustainability, is an entirely new vice dean assignment. Discussions are underway on how she, as vice dean, should work in the field and what specific issues she should address. In general, she believes in creating systems that make it easy to make good choices. She also notes that sustainability and internationalization are two areas that interact. It is no coincidence that these assignments have landed with the same vice dean.

“Sustainability encompasses much more than the environment and climate. Among the UN’s sustainability goals, aspects such as good health, gender equality, and peaceful and inclusive societies are also highlighted,” says Ewa-Lena Bratt and continues:

“Internationalization is important to me for people to understand each other, and it reduces the risk of conflicts in the world, which is one of the UN’s global sustainability goals. At the same time, long journeys put a significant strain on the climate. We all need to consider the significance of whether I am present at a meeting in another country or if the meeting can have the same effect with fewer participants.”

BY: ELIN LINDSTRÖM