Health price 24.09.2024

You may be wondering what a health network is doing in an association like Wood Bee, and why a health prize is rewarding an innovation in construction? Human health, public health, global health, planetary health – these are the direct or indirect consequences, but above all the most important consequences, of this whole mess!

We don’t build for the sake of building. We don’t protect the environment to ‘save the planet’, as we still hear all too often. We build to house human activities, often to house people, sometimes captive or vulnerable people, hospital patients, for example. We protect the environment in order to protect human health: the health of the users of the buildings we sometimes construct (hospitals, EMS, etc.), the health of the workers who construct these buildings, and the health of the people who live around these buildings.

The Health Prize jury examined all the finalist projects from the point of view of their direct or indirect contribution to health. With Claire Bauduin, corporate health specialist at Groupe Mutuel, Camille Desplands, lecturer at HESAV and head of innovation for the Vaud SMCs, and Estelle Delamare, a young paediatric intern at HFR and one of the founders of HFF in French-speaking Switzerland, we scrutinised the health arguments (how is your innovation good for health in general, and for users in particular?) Two principles are put forward: the elimination or reduction of harm or risks: primum non nocere (first do no harm: the basis of the Hippocratic triangle between the doctor, the disease and the patient). And the notion of co-benefits: what’s good for health is good for the environment, and vice versa.

In the end, the project that won over the most people was the one that proposed not so much a technological innovation, but rather a social innovation. A way of saying that what is needed is not so much to do something more or to do something else, but rather to do things differently and, if possible, to do them better. The collective that is proposing and leading the winning project, which is community-based and participatory, does not imagine implementing an innovation in the world as it is, but is proposing to change the world, in particular by training students and raising public awareness, especially among children. To make the world a better place. When innovation dares to be utopian, it’s good for your health

I’d like to introduce the winners of the Prix Santé: the Re-Built! collective.

Philippe Anhorn, DBA
Director of the Réseau Santé Région Lausanne
Associate researcher at the Business Science Institute
Lecturer at the School of Public Health, Université de Montréal