Striving for Excellence through Action Research & Capacity building in eHealth (SEARCH)

Members og search project. Photo.
Signing the search project. Photo 2.
Signing the search project. Photo.

SEARCH is a student & staff mobility project aiming to: support international student mobility between the University of Gondar (UoG), the University of South-Eastern Norway (USN) and the University of Oslo (UiO). We aim to improve health informatics curriculum at the partner institutions; internships at joint partners, joint curriculum development, joint student supervision and joint high quality action research.

About the project

The project will result in coordinated health informatics curriculum through 5 new or revised courses; 46 Master and 12 PhD student exchanges (involving coursework, co-supervision and internships); 4 master student and faculty seminars; and 20 jointly written scientific papers.

Recently, the partner in Ethiopia (UoG) has been selected to be center of excellence in health informatics education by Ethiopian Federal Ministry of Health (FMOH). The Department currently leads Capacity building and Mentorship program (CBMP)- a government-funded program to provide health informatics technical support to FMOH and regional health offices. With the growing number of students and projects, UoG is in urgent need of institutional collaborations to send their students abroad for experience sharing and the university has different projects to host students from the North. SEARCH will help UoG to fulfill its quest. The main partner in Norway (USN) is also uniquely positioned to build a sustainable student exchange program. As a newly established University, USN needs to further strengthen its programs by establishing high quality research & exchange partnerships. The Information systems group at UiO had a long experience in exchange & student mobility. Overall, this proposed SEARCH project will hugely contributes in extending intra-institutional partnership within USN’s Health and IT study programs and can also foster inter-institutional partnership between USN, UiO and UoG.

Project Goals

The overall goals of the longtime collaboration between USN,UoG & UiO are to:

  • Strengthen and maintain the academic capacity at University of Gondar and its eHeathlab center of excellence.
  • Enable research student exchange from UoG to Norway and vice versa.
  • Establish a globally relevant interdisciplinary collaboration and partnership for education, research and innovation in the domain of health and information technology in general and to Health information systems in developing countries in particular;
  • Develop new modules, revise and re-consolidate courses on digitization & innovation in eHealth education at all partners;
  • Strengthen the academic capacity at USN through improved collaboration between campuses and faculties at USN and also with UiO and UoG

Financing

SEARCH is financed by NORPART  (Norwegian Partnership Programme for Global Academic Cooperation) in the period 2019-2023, supporting academic partnerships and student mobility with an emphasis on Master and PhD level between higher education institutions in Norway and selected developing countries.

Project Coordinator

Project Participants

Become a student?

In order to do become a student in this exchange programme, contact one of the participants above.