From last October until next January, our colleague of the Observatory of Pain, the researcher Helena de Sola, is doing a training stay at the Department of Public Health and Clinical Medicine of the Unit of Epidemiology and Global Health of the University of Umeå (Sweden) under the supervision of Dr. Isabel Goicolea, specialist in research about genre and health through innovative mixed methodologies.
This university is a leader in research and postgraduate training in Public Global Health and it has a strong international and multicultural presence, since it receives over 28000 university students or from specialisation programmes and over 2.000 doctorate students from 60 different nationalities. This is translated in collaborations with lots of countries all over the world, reaching excellence in public and global health research, among other fields.
During her stay, Helena is training, principally in qualitative investigation, genre and health. Thanks to Dr. Goicolea’s experience, from the point of the methodology, her stay is making a big contribution to elaborate the third article of her thesis about “the experience of people who have chronic pain and that takes a treatment with opioids”. Also, it should be pointed out that her international stay is part of the doctorate degree that she is doing and that will allow her to obtain the doctor’s degree with European mention.
After her stay, Helena will rejoin the Observatory of Pain where she will be able to apply the new acquired knowledge to the study of pain in order to have a more precise idea of pain’s situation in our social environment, one of the main goals of the Observatory.