Health Campus Turku inspires innovation
Health Campus Turku will provide new cooperation opportunities between the different expert groups in the fields of social and health care. It creates a joint innovation platform for top research and education, and for the structures of the administration. Vice Rector Juhani Soini started as the new Chair of the campus at the beginning of 2017.
The parties involved in the Health Campus Turku development work are the Hospital District of Southwest Finland, Turku University of Applied Sciences, the University of Turku, Åbo Akademi University and Novia University of Applied Sciences.
Earlier the Chair of the steering group was Professor Pentti Huovinen, and this year TUAS’ Vice Rector Juhani Soini took over the position.
“Through this cooperation, our campus will become an attractive and inspiring environment for companies in the field as well as researchers and organizers of education” says Soini, the new Chair.
The aim of the parties in the Health Campus Turku network is to “develop Health Campus Turku as a multidisciplinary, international state-of-the-art competence cluster in education and research related to the fields of medicine, health and well-being".
To reach this goal, the network will promote
- the prerequisites of scientific research and researchers’ cooperation on the campus
- the teaching and education activities of the organizations involved
- entrepreneurial and innovation activities on the campus and its area of impact and developing the university hospital as an innovation platform
- the effectiveness of the administration by simplifying structures and increasing the synergy of operations
- joint operational opportunities for researchers, students and teachers on the campus.
“The Hospital District of Southwest Finland provides the higher education institutions a genuine learning environment, and as organizers of education, we get to participate in development projects and in addition to nursing and rehabilitation, in the development of medical technology, information systems, robotics and architectural engineering.
In the future, the campus will become Finland’s largest multidisciplinary cluster of education in the field of medicine and health care”, Soini adds.
Projects and different forms of cooperation are already underway and the synergy benefits are clear.
“The joint teachers in clinical nursing and sports laboratory of the Hospital District and TUAS, the YSI project coordinated by the University of Turku and the Monelle project (The development of multidisciplinary education, research and services) are good examples of successes”, Soini says.
“On an international scale, the research in Turku is state-of-the-art, and as we include more companies in the field, the future prospects look excellent”, he concludes.
Read more:
The Monelle project (in Finnish)