A current debate is going on in Sweden about the health-care organization, how it is structured today and how it should be structured in the future. Despite major changes in the county council structures, they still got problems with for instance economy and the providing of staff. As an answer to these problems new solutions are being developed.In this thesis I examine such a solution consisting of cooperation between County councils. The aim of the thesis is to examine how and why the County councils in Sörmland and Västmanland have made a decision regarding cooperation over the administrative border.My contribution is to construct a model over change and decision processes that can be used in other cases as well. The conclusion is partly that the decision to cooperate is built on changing structural factors, such as economy, demography and medical development.

Sweden's aging population makes the need for a viable health care urgent and telemedicine can be a solution to enable older people to receive or give themselves care in their homes. Furthermore, implementation of telemedicine has the potential to realise profits in society by increasing the accessibility of health care and minimizing travel costs. Sweden?s low population density and geographical configuration makes the advantages of telemedicine even more appealing. To illustrate the differences between the County councils? use of telemedicine and thus increasing the possibility for coordinated care between them, the authors have on behalf of the Innovation Centre at the Karolinska University hospital mapped the amount of telemedicine technologies that are available in the Swedish County councils? today. To collect information an electronic survey and video or telephone interviews were used.

This essay examines the policy process of specialist medical training in three Swedish counties. The essay will first describe the policy process. Secondly the politicians parti-cipating in the process is examined. Thirdly, it is tested whether it is possible to analyze the policy process based on Ostrom's theories of cooperation around a common pool resource. In this case, the common pool resource is specialized medical practitioners skills that the Swedish County councils must collaborate on to competence should be sufficient for the county council needs, something that is not the case today.One conclusion of the study is that the health care law is not clear enough when it comes to who is responsible for providing a sufficient number of specialists.

The Swedish system of environmental quality objectives is a so-called MBO, Management By Objective and has the purpose to guide the Swedish society towards sustainable ecological development. The system involves the whole society from the parliament and the government down to individual citizens. At the regional level, it is the county administrative boards that are responsible for the work with the system of environmental objectives. At the County Administrative Board of Västmanland County, it is the environmental unit who is in charge of work with the environmental objectives and they want input for how to improve their work with the environmental objectives, both internally at the Administrative Board and externally with external parties.The main purpose and goal of the study is to present the work of four other county administrative boards regarding their work with the environmental quality objectives and to identify external parties? opinions of how they want the County Board of Västmanland county to work with them in this matter.The work is designed as a case study of four County councils, where the environmental objectives coordinators at the four county administrative boards were interviewed about their work with environmental quality objectives.

Authorities, municipalities and County councils have great opportunities to pave the way to a sustainable society. In the public sector, the tax revenue is used and therefore it is important that both employees and societal stakeholders feel that they participate in the sector?s decisions and fields of application. Municipalities and County councils are primarily service organisations. The employees? commitment is necessary to be able to reach set goals, to develop procedures and policies that support the overall political goals, in other words, to be successful in the environmental work.

After World War II a rapid expansion of the Swedish health care took place. Theexpansion was realised chiefly as a development of the hospitals and was bothproduced and financed mainly within the public sector. The financing consisted to ahigh degree of government grants from the state to the County councils.During the period for this examination (1945-1955) the public responsibility for thehealth care was expanded. This was expressed in the publicly financed system forhealth insurance and the cut down in the charges that the patients had to pay for thehospital care. These changes led to some discussions on the national level but reformscould on the whole, with exception for the suggested reform of the open health care,be implemented.This case-study performed on the county council in Värmland shows that the degreeof consensus was enhanced on the regional level.

SummaryBackground: Management control is important for all kinds of activities, both in trade and industry and in the public sector since you must economize on scarce resources. There are nevertheless many different views on management control, which have changed with the times. With regard to the public sector in Sweden, the management control systems have changed radically the last half century, especially from the 1980s, due to depressions and increased focus on effectiveness. New approaches have been taken by many municipalities and County councils, both in Sweden and internationally, where the former management control systems have been abandoned in favour of result control, target costing, and activity-based-costing, for example. Another new approach has been the Balanced Scorecard, which was introduced by Kaplan & Norton in a pioneering article in 1992.The Balanced scorecard is a multidimensional tool, originally intended to be used in trade and industry, but with regard to its nature, it has been adopted even by many non-commercial organizations, especially in Sweden.

AbstractThe organization of the health care system in Sweden has been subjected to investigations and discussions in order to make it more effective. The aim is to create a better public health care and to economize on the financial resources. In the year of 2003 an amendment of the Swedish law made it easier for municipalities and County councils to make own solutions and agree about how health service should be organized in the best way. This resulted in a number of test projects. In this paper I will focus on one of these test projects which took place in Borlänge and was based on collaboration between the municipality and the county council in Dalecarlia.

Background:Several studies have shown there has been significant lack of knowledge about women who have sex with women cross infect each other with STIs. It has been less likely that women who have sex with women visit health care than heterosexuals, they often felt badly treated, invisible and did not always know where to turn in case of an STI. Objective: The objective was to examine if STI information from Kalmar and Växjö county websites and GCK-summit, targeted women who have sex with women. Method: With a queer theoretical perspective a critical discourse analysis was made by STI information on the internet. Results: Women who have sex with women have been excluded in the STI information currently available through Kalmar and Växjö county websites.

This essay is based on the work of arranging and making an inventory for an archive consisting of records from the Board of Education (Utbildningsnämnden) within the administration of the County Council in Uppsala, Sweden. This archive is kept at the County councils Archives in Uppsala where I have done the work. I have documented the process and discussed the complex of problems relating to it. In this particular case the issue of limitation of the office of origin and the respect of the fonds, or the principle of provenance, have been of interest. This is due to the fact that the records had been rearranged and mixed with records with other origin related to the Board of Education.

The County Administrative Board is an authority with big variations in their work. The fact that the County Administrative Board work with so many different issues makes it difficult for the general public to get an insight in what they do and what kind of archival material they create. This handbook is made to illustrate what the County Administrative Board do and how you can find your way to the archives and its documents, both as an employ and as a public visitor.The Handbook begins with a historical overview of the County Administrative Board, from the 17th century to today, with focus on the County Administrative Board of Uppsala. As the Handbook is made for both employees and for the general public several ways to enter the archives are described.Since the employees at the County Administrative Board of Uppsala have access to the archives them self the Handbook also provides detailed descriptions about how to find the way to the records. These descriptions both explains the way to archives organized in dossier and archives organized in chronological order, both provided at County Administrative Board of Uppsala.All the records that the County Administrative Board of Uppsala has generated though the years are not available in the building of the County Administrative Board but at The National Archive in Uppsala.

The concept of sustainable development is a challenge that demands cooperation from all levels of society for it to be successful. The focus for this thesis is how politicians within the local councils understand the concept of sustainable development and how they implement it in political decision-making.The basis for the study is a questionnaire that was distributed to 303 local politicians in three municipalities of varying size in Southern Sweden. The study concentrates on departments within the local councils that are directly connected to the Swedish environmental law and the Swedish planning and construction law. One of the primary goals with the aforementioned laws is the achievement of sustainable development within one generation.The outcome of the study was that over half of the local politicians could correctly define sustainable development according to the World Commission on Environment and Development?s (WCED) definition.

The purpose of this thesis is to determine whether the student councils at two schools really have the power to influence, or if it is a matter of mock democracy. I wanted to determine how the student councils work in reality. I conducted my investigation through personal and qualitative interviews with the board of the student council, a social studies teacher and the principle/school management at both schools. After the interviews I compared an analysed my findings. The results show that the two schools work very differently when it comes to studentdemocracy, and even have very different levels of ambition when it comes to the degree of influence that the student council should have at their respective schools.

The concept of sustainable development is a challenge that demands cooperation from all levels of society for it to be successful. The focus for this thesis is how politicians within the local councils understand the concept of sustainable development and how they implement it in political decision-making.The basis for the study is a questionnaire that was distributed to 303 local politicians in three municipalities of varying size in Southern Sweden. The study concentrates on departments within the local councils that are directly connected to the Swedish environmental law and the Swedish planning and construction law. One of the primary goals with the aforementioned laws is the achievement of sustainable development within one generation.The outcome of the study was that over half of the local politicians could correctly define sustainable development according to the World Commission on Environment and Development?s (WCED) definition.

Sweden?s District councils and Country councils are in itself to a large extent responsible for the state financed welfare. Because of this, Sweden has a contribution- and adjustment system. The reason for this system is to create equal chance, for all District councils and Country councils, to be able to give the citizens service independently of their income and non-influential structural differences. The adjustment is built upon the so-called standard cost method, which contains four different parts.