To review the literature on economic evaluations of public health interventions targeting prevention of mental health problems and suicide, to support evidence based societal resource allocation. A systematic review of economic evaluations within mental health and suicide prevention was conducted including studies published between January 2000…

The purpose of this article is to analyse how education and schooling took part in handling the early phase of the COVID-19 pandemic in eight European countries (Denmark, Finland, Germany, Greece, Italy, Norway, Poland and Sweden). The focus is on primary education and on decisions to close schools, or not. Our research was informed by assemblage…

Background: Promotion of healthy behaviour is increasingly highlighted worldwide as a way to improve public health, prevent disease incidence, and decrease long-term costs for healthcare. In Sweden the National Board of Health and Welfare (NBHW) used the well-established format of national guidelines to facilitate a more widespread use of…

The novel coronavirus, also known as COVID-19, has moved rapidly across the world in 2020. This article reports on the recent consequences of the pandemic for early childhood education in Sweden, Norway, and the United States. The authors illustrate the effects of the pandemic on preschools in their countries, against a backdrop of frequent…

Background: Children are provided with food at school in various ways. In Sweden, free school lunches are provided to all children of compulsory school age. Internationally, Sweden is fairly unique in this sense, which makes the country an important example to study and reflect upon. Objective: This article aims to describe the welfare ideology…

This article focus on how the Swedish population is shaped into desirable citizens as resources for the nation's prosperity. The aim is to analyse how health operates as a governing technique in discourses of lifelong learning. Within such current discourses the population is today described as generally well-educated and healthy, but not educated…

Collaboration between academia and actors outside academia (AOAs) has been proclaimed as a way for society to confront challenges in different fields. This 'participatory imperative' is anchored in EU research policy. The paper explores the participatory imperative in contemporary Swedish aging research. Three kinds of motives for participatory…

'Public health' investigates the determinants of health, born during the Enlightenment in the seventeenth/eighteenth century. But 'public health' is also policies, aiming at the improvement of a population's health. There is a mutual interchange between public health as science and as politics. A brief historical background is followed by an…

Sexual abuse is a public health issue with long-term consequences for children's lives and education. The Convention on the Rights of the Child is a key reference point in safeguarding, increasingly incorporated into domestic law. This article aims to strengthen safeguarding theory and practice by reviewing human rights education (HRE) theory and…

There have been increasing demands to improve Swedish children's reading habits, triggered by poor PISA results in 2013, and public healthcare has stepped in as a strong reading-promoting actor. Drawing on the emerging field of valuation research in STS, the paper explores the values enacted in health-related information brochures about reading…

Background: The research aim of this study was to analyse aspects of job satisfaction in daily work with people with intellectual disability (ID) in schools, social services and health care. Method: With a comparative approach we collected data via a digital questionnaire with in total 333 respondents. The empirical material was analysed through a…

Against the background of climate change, which enables infectious diseases to move their frontiers and the increasing global mobility, which make people more exposed to contagion, we as citizens need to relate to this new scenario. A greater number of infectious diseases may also potentially lead to an increased need to use antibiotics and…

This paper explores the practice of evidence-based policy in a Swedish healthcare context. The study focused on how policymakers in the specific working group, the Priority-Setting Group (PSG), handled the various forms of evidence and values and their competing rationalities, when producing the Swedish National Guidelines for heart diseases that…

In recent decades education has been suggested as an important solution to current problems of the population's health. A high level of education in general is construed as essential for the nation's well-being and competitiveness. In this article we problematise the ways in which discourses on education, learning and health have become…

Dance has been a part of the physical education (PE) curriculum in several countries for a long time. In spite of this, studies demonstrate that the position of dance in the subject of PE is contested and that little time is devoted to dance. The overall aim of this article is to examine the position of dance as a pedagogical discourse in Swedish…