About BCEPS

Better health for all, more fairly distributed

BCEPS at the University of Bergen (UiB)

Within the University of Bergen, BCEPS is part of the Section for Ethics and Health Economics at the Department of Global Public Health and Primary Care. We are located on the fourth floor of Overlege Danielssens Hus, Årstadveien 21, 5009 Bergen, Norway.

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BCEPS/IGS

BCEPS' Primary Objective

The overall objective of the Bergen Centre for Ethics and Priority Setting in Health is to understand and promote ethically acceptable, fair, and efficient priority setting in national health systems. BCEPS researchers currently carry out work in Norway, Ethiopia, Malawi, Zanzibar, India, Tanzania, Ghana, Nepal, and the US. 

BCEPS' Leadership

BCEPS Director Ole Frithjof Norheim is a physician and professor and an internationally renowned scholar of medical ethics and priority setting in health. He is also an adjunct professor in Global Health and Population at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health at Harvard University. Norheim is a Member of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters since 2021. He works both academically and practically on how to design health systems that provide efficient and equitable resource utilisation, and has published over 200 peer-reviewed articles in leading journals, such as The Lancet, Science, BMJ, Health Policy and Planning and many others.

BCEPS Deputy Director is Ingvild Fossgard Sandøy, physician and professor in Global Public Health at the Centre for International Health at the University of Bergen. She also serves as Deputy Director of the Centre for Intervention Science in Maternal and Child Health (CISMAC) at UiB and Co-Director of Development Learning Lab (UiB). Her areas of expertise are global public health, sexual and reproductive health (with a focus on low-and-middle-income countries) and social epidemiology and prevention.

BCEPS' Main Research Workstreams

The work being conducted at BCEPS cuts across the disciplines of ethics, health economics and priority setting in health and can be divided into four main research workstreams, led by four Principal Investigators: BCEPS Director Professor Ole Frithjof Norheim, BCEPS Deputy Director Professor Ingvild Fossgard Sandøy, Professor Kjell Arne Johansson, and Professor Ingrid Miljeteig.

Ole Frithjof Norheim leads the Rationing Lab, Ingvild Sandøy leads research teams in global public health, Kjell Arne Johannson leads the FairChoices research team, and Ingrid Miljeteig leads the Medical Ethics research team.

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BCEPS' Funding and Establishment as a Centre

In 2019, the Trond Mohn Foundation (TMS) joined forces with the University of Bergen and the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation (Norad) to establish BCEPS, building on a platform of existing projects managed by the Global Health Priorities (GHP) Research Group and funded by earlier grants from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Norad, the Research Council of Norway (RCN), and the University of Bergen.

BCEPS’ research activities are relevant in both a national and international context, with BCEPS researchers often being called upon to provide input to debates on priority setting in health in Norway and internationally. When the Centre was established in 2019, funding was allocated to planned project activities in Ethiopia, Zanzibar, and Malawi.

Since then, it has attracted additional funding from RCN and Norad for activities that are now ongoing in India, Nepal, Tanzania, and Ghana.

In September 2023, BCEPS earned the prestigious status of an RCN Centre for Excellence in recognition of the quality, scope, and importance of the research being done at the Centre, which also provides funding from RCN for the next ten years.

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BCEPS' Global Collaboration Network

BCEPS has an extensive network of collaborative partners in Norway and abroad, including a key partner at the University of Addis Ababa in Ethiopia, the Addis Centre for Ethics and Priority Setting (ACEPS).

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BCEPS

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BCEPS funding organisations