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In 1998 three Danish universities developed an interdisciplinary, problem‐oriented curriculum in order to strengthen capacity‐building capabilities in the area of environmental education, training and research at universities and research organisations in Malaysia and Thailand earmarked for environment and development assistance by the Danish government. The programme, which was partly implemented in developing countries as periods of fieldwork, represented important educational innovations. The purpose of this study was to evaluate these activities. The distinct principles forming the educational foundation of the programme were identified. These related to the curriculum organization, the learning tasks and the learning environment. The first step in a cogent evaluation process was to examine how the educational principles were oprerationalized into practical teaching/learning steps. In the next step, they formed the criteria for the evaluation. On the basis of quantitative and qualitative data it was shown that the programme fulfilled the stipulated accademic requirements.

The purpose of this paper is to increase knowledge of the role organizational factors have in how health personnel make efficiency-thoroughness trade-offs, and how these trade-offs potentially affect clinical quality dimensions.

The paper is a thematic synthesis of the literature concerning health personnel working in clinical, somatic healthcare services, organizational factors and clinical quality.

Identified organizational factors imposing trade-offs were high workload, time limits, inappropriate staffing and limited resources. The trade-offs done by health personnel were often trade-offs weighing thoroughness (e.g. providing extra handovers or working additional hours) in an environment weighing efficiency (e.g. ward routines of having one single handover and work-hour regulations limiting physicians' work hours). In this context, the health personnel functioned as regulators, balancing efficiency and thoroughness and ensuring patient safety and patient centeredness. However, sometimes organizational factors limited health personnel's flexibility in weighing these aspects, leading to breached medication rules, skipped opportunities for safety debriefings and patients being excluded from medication reviews.

Balancing resources and healthcare demands while maintaining healthcare quality is a large part of health personnel's daily work, and organizational factors are suspected to affect this balancing act. Yet, there is limited research on this subject. With the expected aging of the population and the subsequent pressure on healthcare services' resources, the balancing between efficiency and thoroughness will become crucial in handling increased healthcare demands, while maintaining high-quality care.

Understanding of the effects of formal education on HIV/AIDS infection in South Saharan Africa (SSA) has been a complex task because consecutive waves of research offer different, seemingly contradictory results and explanations of what exactly are the schooling effects on HIV/AIDS and the causal mechanisms driving those effects. This chapter concentrates on the narrative and implications of the key substantive findings from a multidisciplinary scientific team that was formed to explore the precise nature of the relationship between population education and the HIV/AIDS pandemic in SSA and to determine the main causal mechanisms behind the association. As members of this team, this chapter reviews and synthesizes our technical demographic, epidemiological, and health research. This, and other relevant research, suggests that, like in other cases of education and health risk, because of a historical change in the public health and information environment during the pandemic there was a shift in which outcomes of education dominated individual's sexual and disease prevention behavior. The SSA HIV/AIDS case is thoroughly examined, and then used to bridge to a general discussion of the effects of educational development on population health.