Dr Johanna Wiisak is a SyMeCo postdoctoral fellow with Lero@UoG and is undertaking her fellowship under the supervision of Prof Kate Kenny.

Johanna achieved her PhD in Health Sciences with Nursing Science as a main subject in 2023 at the University of Turku, Faculty of Medicine, Department of Nursing Science. She did her PhD study about whistleblowing in healthcare (available online: https://www.utupub.fi/handle/10024/174492). She also holds a registered nurse’s degree and has worked as a registered nurse in various fields including operating theatre and emergency clinic among others. Her research interest is in the field of healthcare ethics and nursing ethics, particularly from the perspective of professionals, management and governance.

Johanna has worked previously as a researcher at the University of Turku, Department of Nursing Science on two international and one national research project. One project, involving 14 European countries, focused on the decision-making and roles of nurse leaders at political, strategic and tactical levels during the COVID-19 pandemic, and another one, involving six European countries that investigated the moral competence of nurses and developed and tested an ethics Massive Open Online Course (MOOC). A national research project aimed to promote the careers of early career nurses by strengthening well-being at work in care settings for older people. Currently she is supervising Bachelor’s and Master’s theses in the fields of whistleblowing and ethical leadership in healthcare among others.

Johanna’s SyMeCo research project, titled “Towards an ethically sustainable and resilient health care”, explores whistleblowing, resilience engineering and whistleblowing technology at micro (individual) and meso (team and organization) levels in healthcare from the perspective of healthcare professionals and managers using mixed methods (including focus group interviews and time-series data) with a systems thinking approach. The aim is to combine these perspectives into a theoretical framework to understand their complex dynamics and make suggestions for stakeholders to promote accountability and resilience engineering through whistleblowing solutions.

The expected impact of Johanna’s research project is threefold: 1) theoretical: a framework to understand the multilevel and complex sociotechnical dynamics of whistleblowing in healthcare; 2) empirical/methodological: a developed instrument to measure whistleblowing in healthcare, the establishment of an international time series data collection; and 3) practical/political: suggestions for stakeholders for the use of policymaking and practice. This two-year research project forms the theoretical basis for researchers to develop interventions towards ethically sustainable and resilient healthcare.