Newsletter 96, May 2019

Follow-Up on the dialogue meetings on the WPA

Thank you everyone who attended the three meetings and who came up with constructive suggestions for what we can do to improve the working environment. The suggestions will now be used to prepare a plan of action of what we can do in the future.

Welcome to Jeanette Gunder Madsen

Jeanette Gunder Madsen has been employed as a new management consultant in the position that was vacant after Anni Mandrup Høegh. The position has been openly advertised, and there were more than 50 applicants. Many of them were highly qualified. We hope that all of you will welcome Jeanette.

Implementation of the new medical curriculum

We have now revised the teaching organization in connection with the new medical curriculum, which starts in the autumn of 2020. There will be five teaching teams (Microscopic and macroscopic anatomy, Genetics, Biochemistry and physiology; Microbiology and Immunology, Pharmacology) each with their own team leader. All lecturers will be affiliated with one of the five teams, and we can then continue work on implementing the new curriculum.

Protect your data

AU has prepared a checklist that everyone should familiarize himself or herself with in order to improve our data security and protect personal data. The checklist is available here: medarbejdere.au.dk/informationssikkerhed/tjekliste/ and contains a wide range of good advice on data protection when you are at AU and when you are out in the world.

Please clean up in the freezers

As many of you have noticed, we have had problems with the freezers in the Skou Building. We are in the process of setting up alarms on the freezers, and after the summer holidays, we are planning a better organization of the freezers, including introducing incentives (user fees) in order to minimize what we store. In particular, the large -150 degree freezers are very costly to run. We have estimated that the electricity fee for running the 10 large -150 freezers is more than DKK 1 million per year. For this reason, we would like to encourage you to tidy up the freezers during the summer.

Kitchenettes in Skou

Help yourself and your colleagues make the Skou Building a good place to be. Among other things, you can do so by helping keep the kitchenettes on each floor neat and tidy. If you see a used cup on the table, put it in the dishwasher, and your colleague will do it for you next time. The office aid, who we have employed, can only check the state of the kitchenette once a day.

Avoid salary deduction – settle accounts in RejsUd within 90 days

The rules have been tightened for settlement of expenses paid by AU credit cards, so that everyone in the RejsUd system must settle accounts in the system within a period of 90 days. Otherwise, the amount will be deducted from your salary. It is the faculty management team that has decided on the new three-month limit, and it is, of course, due to the fact that a lot of effort is put into reminding employees who forget to get it done. The procedure with salary deduction comes into force after the summer holidays, and it has already been introduced at ST. If you need help with the RejsUd system, you can either consult the faculty guidelines or contact the secretariat for help.

Reminder: Use AU’s purchasing agreements

A spot check at AU shows that in too many cases we do not comply with the legislation regarding purchases of, e.g. research equipment. This is an opportunity to ask you to remember to use the university's purchasing agreements – often they also reduce our costs.

The faculty is on LinkedIn

Our faculty has a LinkedIn page now where you can get the latest news on what is going on at the faculty: What your colleagues publish, contribute to newspapers, events they organize and which grants they receive. Follow the page here: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/healthau/ and use the hashtag #HealthAU when you make posts of Health-related relevance. Then we can find and follow each other.

It was also her house...

Ellen-Margrethe Skou, who inaugurated the Skou building, which many of us are working in, died last month, 93 years old. Many of us remember that she took the floor when she cut the string at the inauguration in October last year and briefly, but accurately, put into words what it is like to work with and for science. Ellen-Margrethe was active in the committee that today is called National Committee on Health Research Ethics, the blood donor case and much more.

All honour to her memory!

Kind Regards,

Thomas G. Jensen