Dóra Guðrún Guðmundsdóttir is Director of Public Health at the Directorate of Health in Iceland. Dora is trained clinical and organisational psychologist and holds a PhD in public health. Her research interests focus on the epidemiology of wellbeing and finding reliable measures to evaluate the wellbeing of a population over time.

 

Dóra´s passion lies in finding effective ways for individuals, institutions and societies to flourish. She has a special interest in enhancing evidence based knowledge in policy making and interventions. She has served as a governmental expert on mental health and do represent Iceland in a Steering group for NCD prevention for the EU. At the Directorate of Health in Iceland her division leads the work on health promoting communities – wellbeing for all, which collaborates with the prime minister´s office on UN´s Sustainable Development Goals and Wellbeing Economy.

 

Her current research projects focus on evaluating wellbeing programmes in schools and primary health care. She is the author of a book on Wellbeing and Success in Icelandic. She has also written a chapter for The World Book of Happiness as well as “Positive Psychology for Social Change”. Dóra has been an invited speaker at numerous conferences, e.g. at the World Health Organisation´s conference on Health in All Policies, the European Conference on Positive Psychology and the African Positive Psychology Conference.

 

She is affiliated with the Wellbeing institute, Cambridge University, Director of Graduate Diploma programme on Positive Psychology at the University of Iceland, and the current president of the European Network for Positive Psychology (ENPP)

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>Presentation Topic: Wellbeing for all - leaving no one behind.

The UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDG´s) aim at achieving a better, more sustainable future for all. They address the global challenges we face where "Good Health and Well-being" and "Quality Education" are among the goals where the theme is "leaving no one behind". The Icelandic whole-of society approach to promote health and wellbeing for all as well as the health promoting school approach, was developed in line with these goals. 94% of Icelanders now live in health promoting communities. All upper secondary schools are health promoting and many primary- and pre-schools. Universal interventions aiming at reducing risk behaviour and increase wellbeing have been a success. However, small minority groups do not benefit from the interventions. It is important to develop whole of a society approach to wellbeing with universal interventions to improve wellbeing as well as special interventions targeted at minority groups – in order to reach wellbeing for all - leaving no one behind.