Arnhild Melve

Field of work

1st of April 2021, I started in a 4-year Ph.D. position at the Bergen campus. The position sort under the section for community work, where I spend 25% of my working hours. For the rest of the time (75%), I will work on my Ph.D. project and the postgraduate education at the Ph.D. program Health, Function and Participation.

My professional background is physiotherapy, HSE, and quality work. Practical experiences include promoting a healthful work environment and counseling to prevent and follow-up sick leave. From this background, I have built a knowledge of and interest in how environmental and social conditions and terms affect health and community participation at individual and group levels. I have my master's degree in health and social sciences from the Mastery and Empowerment program at Volda University College. Both as a section employee and as a Ph.D. candidate, I base my perspective on how interaction and various structural conditions affect the preconditions for mastering and experiencing independence in one's own life. Empowerment is not easy to translate into Norwegian. I find that "kapasitetsbygging" (capacity-building) represents a relevant understanding of the term. My approach to strategies for capacity-building is to combine mobilization of endogenous resources with exogenous facilitation. With this approach, I am particularly interested in mental health issues, conditions for collaboration between professionals and between professionals and service users, and in connections between health, work participation, and social belonging in general.

The main objective for my Ph.D. project, entitled Job Support Practices, is to explore and demonstrate institutional terms for how involved services work with and collaborate on IPS (Individual Placement and Support).