Managing wicked problems in clinical environments
The project develops a mandatory internship (VFU) within the Master of Science in Engineering programme in Medical Engineering. It aims to strengthen students’ ability to understand and handle complex clinical problems and increase societal relevance and real-world grounding.
Project context
Medical technology operates in a context that is largely characterised by complex, wicked problems: technical, organisational, and clinical challenges without clear solutions, where multiple actors, conflicting objectives, and uncertainties interact. Educating future medical engineering students therefore requires more than technical competence. Students need to develop the ability to understand, formulate, and handle wicked problems in real-world settings.
In the Master of Science in Engineering programme in Medical Engineering (CMEDT), there is not only an opportunity to train these abilities on KTH’s home ground, but also great potential to take a further step and introduce a new compulsory work-integrated learning component (VFU) in collaboration with hospitals and other healthcare organisations in the Stockholm region.
Such a VFU component would give students the opportunity to encounter the clinical reality in which medical technology systems are used, managed, and further developed, and where problems are often wicked by nature. This creates conditions for learning that is not only theoretical, but situated, exploratory, and reflective.
Purpose (outcome)
The purpose of the project is to strengthen the coherence, societal relevance, and connection to healthcare of the CMEDT programme by designing and introducing a VFU course in collaboration with medical technology departments (MTA) in the Stockholm region.
The intended outcomes are:
- Students are better prepared for future work in complex healthcare-related contexts through stronger real-world grounding.
- Students are better equipped to handle real wicked problems through VFU and deeper collaboration with healthcare.
- Students’ ability to work across disciplines, make well-founded decisions under uncertainty, and contribute to the sustainable development of medical technology systems is strengthened.
Project results (output)
The project will deliver the following concrete results:
- Pedagogical and content-related further development of years 1 to 3 of CMEDT, with a focus on how understanding and handling wicked problems can be integrated and followed up throughout the programme. This includes developed or updated learning activities, course syllabuses, and programme syllabus.
- Specifically, a VFU component where students encounter real problems in healthcare environments and are trained to analyse, formulate, and communicate solutions in collaboration with different professions. This includes completed agreements with all MTA units, learning activities, and a new official course syllabus.
- Developed forms for structured student participation, where students actively take part in development work, pilot initiatives, and reflection on intended learning outcomes and educational design.
Student participation in practice-based environments, as well as established forms of collaboration with external actors, including models for supervision and evaluation of students’ performance, are transferable to other educational programmes and areas of practice, with only contextual adaptations.
Time plan
Start date: 2026-03-15
End date: 2027-03-15
Project documentation
If you have a KTH ID, you can read the documents when logged in:
- Poster: The project’s first poster (in Swedish) will be available at the ”Storträffen” meetup autumn 2026
- Project directive (Swedish): Projektdirektiv_FrU26_2610-CBH_VårdnäraOmP.pdf