Sustainability is a growing concept and worldwide are companies, organisations and governments working actively with innovative solutions towards a more sustainable society. However, not all sides of sustainability are receiving equal attention and social sustainability have been left behind in the research agenda. Social sustainability is often knotted with health and urban development.
I have in this thesis investigated how social sustainability is portrayed within healthcare and what value social sustainability creates. With healthcare being a highly complex system, I have used the Danish municipality of Elsinore as a case study, due to their ongoing construction of a new community health centre.
For a decade, the near healthcare has been under development and a continuous struggle of economic pressure and lack of attention has resulted in a healthcare system that is ready for a transition away from the mono-sequential treatment paradigm and towards a more coherent and attentive way of providing healthcare. Medicine has always been about data, but in the process, we lost the human. To rewrite the story, we need to allow the medicine to see the human as a whole and redefine the healthcare paradigm.