Sustainable and competent social service and health care – Strengthening sustainable development competence in the wellbeing services counties Healthcare accounts for 1-5% of global environmental impacts, and in Finland, emissions from the entire social and health sector in 2019 were 6.5%. In the national social service and healthcare objectives, sustainable development plays an important role, and social service and healthcare operations must be socially, economically and ecologically sustainable. Wellbeing services counties play an important role in the fight against climate change, as around 400,000 people work in Finland's wellbeing services counties. There is a risk, however, that wellbeing services counties will lag behind in sustainable development and will be unable to meet statutory targets, such as carbon neutrality, if their employees do not have sufficient competence in sustainable development. The main objective of this project is to build an education model for sustainable development for the employees of the wellbeing services counties and thus to increase the number of educated sustainability experts and managers in the wellbeing services counties. The aim is also to identify the level of sustainability competence and aspirations of the staff in the wellbeing services counties and to pilot the developed training model. The aim is also to increase RDI cooperation between higher education institutions and wellbeing services counties. Once the project is completed, the aim is to extend the use of the training model so that other wellbeing services counties in Finland can also benefit from its content. The project focuses on two bilingual wellbeing services counties: the Wellbeing Services county of Southwest Finland and the Wellbeing Services County of Ostrobothnia. The responsible organisation for the project is the Novia University of Applied Sciences, which operates in both Southwest Finland and Ostrobothnia. The actual target group of the project is the employees of the Wellbeing Services counties of Southwest Finland and Ostrobothnia, for whom the education model for sustainable development will be developed. After completing the training, they will be able to act as sustainability experts and managers in their own work unit and train other employees in their own unit. The education on sustainable development can be delivered either entirely online or as a hybrid education and consists of two parts: 1) basic training on sustainable development in the social and health sector with the same content for all employees and 2) further training, depending on the nature and specific needs of the working unit. The training is available in both Finnish and Swedish. During the project, the aim is to train around 500 wellbeing services county workers, after which the training will be implemented as part of the Wellbeing Services counties' continuous learning activities. In the longer term, the aim is to have at least one expert in each working unit in the wellbeing services counties. The project consists of four work packages: 1) Administration and communication, 2) Benchmarking, i.e. identifying education needs and aspirations, 3) Education design and piloting, and 4) Maintenance and dissemination, i.e. consolidating and implementing the education for wider use. The project will last 2 years and 4 months and will involve experts in sustainable development, social and health care and pedagogy from three organisations: the Novia University of Applied Sciences, the Wellbeing Services county of Southwest Finland and the Wellbeing Services County of Ostrobothnia.