Claudia Hanson

Senior Lecturer, Karolinska Institutet
As a mother, researcher and clinician I'm dedicated to improving maternal and newborn health in low-resource settings. Having worked, lived and done research for over six years in Sub-Saharan Africa, I understood that weak health system are the main reasons why many potentially effective and cheap evidence-based interventions as well as new innovations do not have the impact they should have. Without addressing the key bottlenecks in service provision, the high burden of mortality in pregnancy and around birth will not reduce: Year for year more than 300,000 mothers die together with 2 million babies born dead (stillbirths) and 2 million newborns.

I'm an Associate Professor at KI as well as at London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, London, UK https://www.lshtm.ac.uk/aboutus/people/hanson.claudia.

My research centers much on finding a better balance between accessibility and quality of maternal newborn care and how to improve service provision.

Research description
I’m leading research to evaluate various strategies to improve the quality of care in facilities for maternal and newborn health.

ALERT (Action Leveraging Evidence to reduce perinatal Mortality and morbidity in Sub-Saharan Africa) https://alert.ki.se/

QUALI-DEC (Appropriate use of Caesarean section through QUALIty DECision-making by women and providers) https://www.ceped.org/fr/Projets/Projets-Axe-1/article/quali-dec

I also work on better metrics and indicators for maternal and newborn health and I am part of an advisory board to WHO https://www.who.int/data/maternal-newborn-child-adolescent/monitor

Together with SHIFO, a Swedish NGO, https://shifo.org/en/about/organisation/en/ we are evaluating an innovative scanning system to process health information in Tanzania.

I am the scientific coordinator for the

Sweden – Tanzania PhD training program in reproductive health &
Sweden – Uganda PhD training program in maternal and child health,
both sponsored by Sida and running 2015-2022

My main country focus is East Africa (Tanzania, Uganda, Malawi) and I also work in India, Laos and Benin.

Teaching portfolio
I lead several courses and have a wide teaching portefolio:

“Maternal and Child Health” module of the MSc in Global Health – ongoing (3GB013, 3 credits, 2 weeks) http://ki.se/en/utbildning/3gb12-masters-programme-in-global-health

“Health Planning” module of the MSc in Health Economics, Policy and Management, (2.5 credits, 1,5 weeks ) http://ki.se/en/utbildning/4fh11-masters-programme-in-public-health-sciences

“Research management” of the Master’s in Public Health Sciences (3 credits, 2 weeks) https://education.ki.se/programme-syllabus/4FH19?_ga=2.30109887.1693662900.1589707775-624396290.1561457590

I lead two PhD courses, the “Global Health and Global Burden of Disease” and the “Health Policy and Management” course

I’m responsible for the Doctoral Programme in Biology of Infections and Global Health (BIGH) and support the internationalisation at KI

Internationalisation in education

I’m responsible for the internationalization of the second cycle education in our department. This includes the administration of the SIDA funded MFS grants https://ki.se/gph/minor-field-studies-mfs

I am engaged into the MSc module “Epidemiology and Control of Infectious Diseases in Developing Countries” - https://www.lshtm.ac.uk/study/masters/dmsid.html – at London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.

I teach in Germany and the UK if invited, e.g. on the course on health system of the MSc Global Health Risk Management at the University in Bonn, Germany and the MOOC courses at LSHTM, e.g. the COVID course https://www.lshtm.ac.uk/study/courses/short-courses/free-online-courses/mooc

Education
MD, Dr.med, MSc, MSc, PhD

PhD “Epidemiology of maternal mortality in Tanzania” http://researchonline.lshtm.ac.uk/1012993/1/Thesis%20Claudia%20Hanson%20final%2024April2013.pdf

Dr.med. “Quality of family planning services in Cameroon” http://geb.uni-giessen.de/geb/volltexte/1999/80/pdf/HungerClaudia-1999-04-19.pdf

Specialisation in Gynecology and Obstetrics

MSc International Health (TropEd) from Charité, Berlin, Germany

MSc in Epidemiology from LSHTM, UK.

Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, UK