WHO IS WHO in HAPPY PATIENT – University of Southern Denmark

The University of Southern Denmark was established in 1998 through a merger involving Odense University, the Southern Denmark School of Business and Engineering and South Jutland University Centre. The aim of the University of Southern Denmark is to offer as many young people as possible a research-based degree at the highest academic level and with an international outlook.

Our partner within the University of Southern Denmark in the HAPPY PATIENT project is the Research Unit for General Practice, Institute of public health (RUPO).

During the past 30 years, RUPO has carried out quality improvement- and research audits in several countries including countries in Scandinavia, Eastern Europe, Southern Europe, South America, and Africa. All audits have used the same template and general approach as in this proposal (the APO methodology). In these audits RUPO has been in charge of adapting the template to local conditions in different countries, leading the process, col-lecting and processing the data, and dissemination of results. RUPO has been involved in about 100 peer-reviewed original research publications in medical journals.

In the following video, Jesper Lykkegaard and Malene Plejdrup Hansen introduce their role within the HAPPY PATIENT project:

The Research Unit’s foremost goal is to contribute to the improvement and development of the health of patients in the healthcare system, with particular focus on the efforts in and around general practice.

The Research Unit of General Practice houses an interdisciplinary environment with research collaboration between general medicine, psychology, theology, sociology of religion, anthropology, medical risk communication, statistics, health economics, occupational therapy, nursing, midwifery and public health science. The unit’s interdisciplinary collaboration incorporates multiple methods, both within quantitative and qualitative research.

In addition to having several PhD students and Postdoc students, the Research Unit of General Practice  is responsible for the research training programme for General Practitioners (GPs).

The Research Unit of General Practice is established as a cooperation between the University of Southern Denmark and an external research unit financed by the Research Foundation of General Practice.

Audit Project Odense (APO) and the affiliated EU project HAPPY Audit are also part of the Research Unit’s activities.

Jesper Lykkegaard has been a researcher at University of Southern Denmark since 2008. He is the head of APO since 2017 and a GP in Denmark since 2010. Jesper is highly experienced within the challenges of collecting sufficient, relevant and valid research- and quality improvement data from primary care. Furthermore, Jesper is experienced in tailoring the APO template to fit in various contexts. Jesper has authored most of the recent research papers based on the APO methodology. Jesper is an authorised specialist in family medicine, PhD in medicine, and Bachelor of Business Administration. Jesper’s primary research interest is to identify variations in quality of care and use it for answering generic research questions while bringing the health professionals together in order for them to agree on the best quality of care for the patients. 

Malene Plejdrup Hansen; Associate professor, PhD, MD. Chair of the General Practice Research on Infections Network (GRIN). During the past decade she has been working as a full-time researcher focusing on optimising antibiotic use in primary care. Dr. Hansen took part of the EU-funded project HAPPY AUDIT and has extensive experience with running audits on acute respiratory tract infections.

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