Going from Aalborg and the EU Presidency to Tallinn and the WHO – Future Health Workforce is key to the discussion. NWA participated with Nina Sønderberg and Lars Münter, where Lars Münter was invited to the session to address different policy-level aspects crucial for building sustainable health workforces in a digital age.

This included:

• Enablers of high quality, safe and inclusive digital health environments
• Service design that enables integrated care delivery across heterogenous care environment
• Roles and responsibilities in a future health workforce and pathways to achieving them
• Applying ethics and accountability in AI-driven healthcare environments
• Effective regulatory frameworks

Presenting alongside Kjersti GAUDEN, Department of Specialist Health Care Services, Ministry of Health Norway, Heidi Egede NOASEN, Greenlandic Health Service Greenland, and Deborah Cohen, Chief Operating Officer, Health Workforce Canada, Lars Münter presented on skills, burnout, AI, and trust – as four pillars for collaborative strategies.

Such a pleasure to revisit Tallinn for NWA – and to advance the discussion on these core topics.

In collaboration with the One Health One Road Alliance, Cambridge Medical Academy, European University Cyprus, European Health Futures Forum, and IE Open, the Nordic Wellbeing Academy is organising the Danish-Cypriot EU Policy Sessions – a series of health policy side sessions at the IMBMC 2025 in Nicosia, Cyprus – November 6-8.

The sessions will gather speakers and participants from a global network to discuss and develop new ideas. Meet:

• Adam Skali – Board Member, Institute for Human Centered Health Innovation, ES
• Anna Kudiyarova – Director of the Psychoanalytic Institute for Central Asia, KZ
• Belinda Lin – Hong Kong-Shenzhen Innovation and Technology Park China
• Bogi Eliasen – Executive Director, Movement Health Foundation, DK
• Carina Dantas – IHI ReADI, SHAFE Foundation, and SHINE 2Europe, PL
• Cris Scotter – Special Advisor, WHO Europe, UK
• Diana Arsovic – CEO, Danish Life Science Cluster, DK
• Dr Eva Turk – IHI IMPROVE, HTAi, and University of Applied Science St. Pölten, A
• Dr Ioannis Patrikios – Vice-dean European University Cyprus Medical School CY
• Dr Nina Fuller-Shavel – Director of the National Centre for Integrative Oncology, UK
• Dr Sotiris Themistokleous – Director of Strategic Development Center for Social Innovation CY
• Emma Rawson-Te Patu – President of the World Federation of Public Health Associations, NZ
• Jun (Helena) Li – CEO One Road One Health Medicine, China
• Lars Münter – International Director, Nordic Wellbeing Academy, DK
• MEP Michalis Hadjipantelas, CY
• Nina Sønderberg – National Director, Nordic Wellbeing Academy, DK
• Professor Karsten Kristiansen – Copenhagen University, DK
• Takis Kotis – CEO, Cambridge Medical Academy, GR
• Terry Pirovolakis – CEO, Elpida Technology, CA
• And about 50 other scientists, researchers, professor, experts, and changemakers in the bio-medical conference main tracks

Read more and register (free)

Collaborative creativity at its finest in Aalborg September 18th. NWA collaborated with EHFF to build a co-creative workshop with Natasha Azzopardi Muscat – Director of the Division of Country Health Polices and Systems WHO Europe, Charlotte Marchandise – Executive Director EUPHA, and Stella Goeschl – Young Action Group JA PreventNCD as the superpanelist powering the audience.

In 60 minutes, the audience got to find future strength, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats that should be taken into account for a future strategy, and then our panelist used these to suggest four action items that they hoped the participants – and the Danish EU Presidency – would take up tomorrow to build a new pathway for change. These were voted on by the audience to create a shortlist of five action items for change.

Common Themes Across Speakers

• Burnout & well-being: urgent and systemic.
• Technology: potential but overhyped; must serve both patients and staff.
• Data: better workforce data is essential.
• Inclusion: young people, patients, and vulnerable groups must be part of decision-making.
• Public health: prevention and community-level work relieve pressure on hospitals.

Top 5 Action Points for EU Presidency Action

• Build KPIs for workforce well-being – measure and hold leaders accountable.
• Ensure technology validation – evaluate AI/innovation like medicines (safety, impact, cost-effectiveness).
• Stand up for people with science – evidence-based policies, not quick fixes.
• Inclusion of young people – systematically in panels, education, and policy.
• Stand up for communities – ensure public health and local engagement.

WHO Europe will discuss this further at conferences and events in 2025 and on. The themes will be a strong element of debate at European Public Health Conference 2025 in Helsinki (November), and JA PreventNCD will continue it’s work to tackle determinants, including at a conference in Denmark October 2025.

As part of the One Health One Road Alliance, NWA and EHFF will bring the issue into the Danish-Cypriot Policy Debates in Nicosia November 6-8 as the opportunity of bringing this issue from one EU Presidency to the next is vital. We hope to see many from Aalborg in Nicosia too.

Working in partnerships is one of the most rewarding, most needed, and most difficult endavours humans can do. Building a good relational strategy is a first step, but figuring out if the strategy works can be tricky. Or it used to be! Two new report created by the NWA and a consortium of experts for the Danish Life Science Cluster gives partnership builders, managers, and transformation agents a new tools to navigate this difficult task.

The two reports follows a first report issued earlier this year about the impact of the Danish Lighthouse Life Science. The “Foundation of the Danish Lighthouse Life Science” report describes the architecture behind this collaborative PPP with 400+ members. And in “A New KPI Model for Collaboration and Change“, we introduce a change model with KPIs that can help guide new partnerships along the tricky art of building, expanding, and running a multistakeholder platform towards a common goal.

The key point above all;
You can design collaborative platforms to also generate trust – and here’s a manual.

In a time where trust in institutions and future is eroding, this mechanism of using trust literacy to build new collaborative platforms with strong relational strategies is needed more than ever. We look forward to promote, test, and expand the model much more in coming months and years.

As part of the ISRICM-EU project, NWA conducted a webinar September 10th to explore the use of EFT in HR and expand on the learning of the HR workshop at the ISEFT conference in Bucharest.

NWA and the participants explored the integration of emotion-focused therapy principles into human resource management practices, with participants sharing experiences and discussing applications in workplace settings.

The group explored how emotional intelligence and empathy could enhance HR practices, including creating safe spaces for emotional expression and addressing challenges during organizational transformations.

Discussions covered the role of AI in HR, employee well-being during difficult times, and the importance of maintaining positive workplace culture through transparent communication and support mechanisms.

Find a summary report about the below – and stay tuned for future webinars!

Africa called – from Berlin. As always a great place to visit; this time to attend the Digital Health Africa 2025, organised by/at Charité.

We had the great pleasure of presenting two posters; the first – Women’s Occupational Burnout – on behalf of the EHFF European Health Futures Forum Working Group on Women’s Health, presenting a digital analysis platform to reduce burnout – inspired by WHO Regional Office for Europe SPI-DDH work on this issue.

The second – From Play to Prevention – was the creative spinoff from our recent workshop on AMR at DPH2025 in Madeira where bright minds built this new idea to build antiobiotic awareness, involve schools, and fight AMR across the continents.

Mental health is an urgent issue across every country and society. So it was a great learning experience for us – and both fun, tough, challenging, and rewarding for the professionals and families from Kazakhstan to be able to participate in the 33rd edition of the summer school for phychoanalysis, organised the School of Psychoanalysis in Almaty.

NWA contributed with two lectures and two workshops that allowed the participants to learn more about the psychosomatic symptoms of trauma, about building blocks for creating strategies for mental health and mental health literacy, about emotion-focused therapy individual, group, and organisational practice – and about experiences of improving mental resilience for both frontline workers (of all kinds).

We got to both draw upon work in Europe with both ISRICM-EU about helping vulnerable groups and MentaStress mental training, with WHO Europe and the Strategic Partner’s Initiative for Data and Digital Health on burnout, with ISEFT about professional capacity building – and learned so much about new ways to build mental health literacy in such a diverse group in age, background, history, and more.

We look forward to visit this amazing country and culture again – there are so much to share and combine.

Nordic Wellbeing Academy is pleased to share a new paper co-developed by NWA Founder and International Director Lars Münter and CIES Director of Innovation and Research, Adam Skali: The Trust Equation – How to Build, Measure, and Scale Collaboration That Lasts.

The paper grew out of an iterative dialogue between the two authors, and it tackles a question that comes up constantly in health, education, and sustainability work: everyone agrees partnerships need trust, but few teams have a working method for building it, measuring it, or protecting it once results are on the line.

Why trust deserves operational attention

The authors open with a point worth repeating: trust functions as infrastructure, not sentiment. When it is thin, digital tools stall, partnerships stay shallow, and promising ideas never scale past a pilot. When it is present, people take the interpersonal risks that innovation actually requires – sharing half-formed ideas, flagging disagreement early, committing resources before every outcome is guaranteed.

Rather than leaving trust as an assumed byproduct of good intentions, the paper proposes treating it as a strategic capacity with its own phases, feedback loops, and readiness indicators – something a Theory of Change model can map just as it would map any other outcome.

Old philosophy, current practice

One of the paper’s more distinctive moves is its return to Aristotle. Ethos, pathos, and logos – credibility, emotional resonance, and clear reasoning – are presented as design criteria rather than rhetorical history. The authors pair each with contemporary case studies: the Danish Diabetes Association’s Community Council model for ethos, NHS co-production labs in mental health services for pathos, and participatory budgeting in Porto Alegre for logos. Together the cases suggest that trust-rich institutions are built through repeated, visible practice rather than a single well-crafted mission statement.

Tools for the work itself

Beyond the conceptual framing, the paper offers practical guidance for anyone facilitating multi-stakeholder work:

• Relational mapping tools such as Joint Action, for tracking who is actually talking to whom
• Equity and balance as two distinct diagnostics – who is in the room, and whether everyone in it is genuinely heard
• Readiness assessments for gauging where a partnership stands before launching into large joint meetings
• A caution against rigid KPIs and premature evaluation, since – as the authors puts it in the report – trust moves at its own pace, and treating early uncertainty as failure can derail a partnership before it stabilizes

The paper also addresses trust repair directly, arguing that breakdowns are inevitable in long-term collaboration and that recovery deserves the same intentional design as trust-building itself.

A note on context

The two authors are careful not to universalize a single model. What works in a high-trust setting like Denmark, where informal agreement can substitute for formal process, may need a different starting point elsewhere – in some contexts, confidence in a known individual carries more weight than confidence in the institution behind them. The paper treats this variation as a design input, not an exception to work around.

Read the full paper

The Trust Equation report includes a full reference list drawing on the OECD Guidelines on Measuring Trust, recent WHO Europe publications, and academic literature on organizational trust and systems change. It is a useful companion for policymakers, funders, and facilitators shaping multi-stakeholder initiatives – and a natural extension of ongoing work on trust in transformation.

Nordic Wellbeing Academy participated in Digital Public Health 2025 in Madeira, July 24-26, 2025. Three great days of knowledge sharing in an amazing scenery.

Some great results it was:

Award-win!
With Carina Dantas, Miriam Cabrita, and Paloma Moraga, we won an award for Best Student Abstract (as Carina Dantas is current also a PhD student). The abstract revolved around inclusion in digital development and will thus also be developed into a full paper later in 2025.

MyHealth@MyHands sharing
In addition to the abstract win, it was a great chance to get to share more about the work in MyHealth@MyHands to ensure inclusion and diversity for trust.

AMR co-creation
On the basis of our work and collaboration with EHFF, we conducted a co-creative workshop on creative, digital strategies for fighting AMR. The participants found this extremely interesting and we we able to create a joint new concept for gamification to further the use of AMR literacy in educational settings. We look forward to share more about this later.

MentaStress and WHO SPI-DDH connections
Several participants at the conference were working with pandemic preparedness, mental resilience, and/or burnout. Especially the stakeholders from WHO Europe will be really interesting for further work on MentaStress, while several clinical stakeholders were eager to learn more about the use of AI as a management and analysis tool to reduce burnout from the work in the WHO Strategic Partners Initiative for Data and Digital Health.

WHO Wellbeing Policy Pathways
The audience were also quite excited about the new WHO Policy document we had contributed too working with EuroHealthNet and a great consortium of clever partners.

ISRICM-EU
Inclusion and integration was a core part of our presentation and abstract. Many participants therefore also wanted to know more about our recent work in Bucharest about HR guidelines and the combination of digital support tool, training mechanisms for middle managers, and the creation of a supportive and inclusive culture in modern workplaces.

In short – a Magic Madeira for NWA projects and networking.

NWA contributed with great team of experts led by EuroHealthNet to build a new guidance with policy pathways for five key domains for health:

1. Nurturing planet earth and its ecosystems
2. Promoting social protection and welfare systems based on equity, inclusion and solidarity
3. Promoting equitable universal health coverage
4. Equitable economies that serve human development
5. Promoting equitable digital systems

Quote from Preface by WHO Secretary-General Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus

“We need to reform siloed systems and institutions, foster innovation, and ensure that knowledge and resources are shared equitably. This requires individuals and communities to think in truly integrated and creative ways, embracing local wisdom and lived experiences as essential tools for change. Ignoring this imperative is not an option.

To achieve this, we must prioritize a transformative vision: the creation of “well-being societies” – environments where people can reach their full potential, live healthy and fulfilling lives in harmony with nature, and actively contribute to their communities. These societies must be built on key principles:

• Recognizing that well-being goes beyond the absence of disease, and encompasses physical, mental and social well-being.
• Understanding that well-being depends on a complex interplay of social, economic and environmental conditions.
• Embracing a whole-of-government and whole-of-society approach to decision-making that looks beyond narrow economic metrics.”

Quite an intro to a document with policy advice for