Ewa Ehrenborg - vice-dean for collaboration with Stockholm County Council

Professor Ewa Ehrenborg has been appointed the new vice-dean for collaboration with Stockholm County Council (SLL), with a particular focus on education at Karolinska University Hospital.

Radical changes are taking place in the healthcare field in Stockholm, changes that impact on KI. Karolinska University Hospital is being reorganised under a new business model and a large volume of outpatient care is being moved out.

In order to make sure that high quality education can still be obtained at the hospital, KI created the office of vice-dean for collaboration with SLL, with a focus on education, in 2017. This year, this role has been assigned to Ewa Ehrenborg, professor of molecular cardiovascular medicine at the Department of Medicine, Solna.

“The appointment is a very important one, especially in light of the consequence analysis of Karolinska University Hospital’s new business model that was done during my predecessor Carl-Fredrik Wahlgren’s time,” she says.

The consequence analysis showed that action needs to be taken to ensure that students, especially medical students, can attain certain intended learning outcomes and degree objectives. There is now an agreement with concrete solutions on how to achieve this. Professor Ehrenborg will be putting her energies into monitoring progress.

“A great deal of healthcare is moving out and the students need to be at local hospitals, academic specialist centres and so on, so that they can deal with patients with common and acute conditions and learn to independently diagnose and treat them.”

Part of Professor Ehrenborg’s role is to make sure that education at KI maintains a high level of quality. To this end she will be working closely with, amongst other bodies, the various clinics and units at Karolinska University Hospital.

“The hospital’s new business concept also creates new opportunities for learning that we want our students to enjoy.”

Professor Ehrenborg was awarded KI’s Pedagogical Prize in 2017 for having developed interprofessional learning and student-activating teaching that integrate closely with the latest research.

The office of vice-dean also includes ensuring the availability of teaching environments where students from different professions can learn from each other and together, as well as clinical training environments.

The office of vice-dean is a temporary half-time position during 2018 and reports to the dean of education, Annika Östman Wernerson.

“Ewa Ehrenborg is a doctor and a researcher with a wide contact network in education,” says Professor Östman Wernerson.

“For many years, she’s been the director and coordinator of the Centre for Clinical Education, where she has worked hard to raised the quality of Work-Integrated Learning on our programmes. She’s therefore highly suited to the important office of vice-dean for collaboration.”

Text: Ann Patmalnieks