Kan vi rädda världen? Några folkhälsopedagogers syn på mötet mellan utbildning och arbetsliv

Sammanfattning: The state of health in Sweden demonstrates a high average length of life at the same time as diseases, due to luxurious living, grew into more and more widespread public health problems. Finding out that information is not enough to get man to live healthy has been conducive to a pedagogic based health education. An illustration of such an education is Public health pedagogy at the University of Kristianstad. The question is, does this education correspond to the new claims that society lays to health work? Our purpose was to throw light upon how individuals, qualified as public health pedagogues, look upon their work on one hand and how different clusters of thought from their study programme are conceived as activated in their professional exercise on the other. Our method was qualitative and we employed semistructured interviews with eleven ex-healthstudents. Our results demonstrate the idea of the health pedagogue as an all-embracing co-ordinator with a vision of saving the world. Our study also disclose that concepts from the study programme, such as salutogenic, holistic, participation, health promoting and pedagogic competence, were employed in the speech of the pedagogues. A question of great interest to us is whether this state of affairs indicates more than just knowledge acquired at school. We consider it very important that the educational programme appears to be relevant to the intended labour-market and we wish our results to be used in developing the study programme as well as health promoting areas.