Dr Claudia Hanson
MD, PhD, MSc International Health (TropEd) MSc Epidemiology (LSHTM)
Associate Professor
I’m a medical doctor with a specialisation in gynaecology and obstetrics and a further postgraduate education in international health (MSc Int Health, TropEd) and epidemiology (MSc & PhD from LSHTM). I work at the school and also at Karolinska Institutet, Sweden, where I hold a senior lectureship position https://ki.se/en/people/clahan.
I’m working in the field of global maternal health since 1991. During 1996-99 I did my German doctoral thesis (Dr.med) on the quality of family planning services in Cameroon within a project of improving reproductive health services implemented by the German Technical Cooperation (GIZ). I worked in the early 2000s again for 4 years for the German cooperation as a project manager and project leader for reproductive health and multisectoral HIV programmes in Tanzania.
Centres
Teaching
My area of teaching spans from 1) maternal, newborn and reproductive health, to 2) health systems, policy and planning, 3) global health and 4) epidemiology. At the school, I am a distance learning tutor “Epidemiology and Control of Infectious Diseases in Developing Countries” module. At Karolinska Institutet, I teach on maternala and newborn health, health planning, health systems and policy and Global Health. I also lead and teach on a 2-week course of Maternal and Child Health. I supervise regularly MSc student projects from different MSc programmes. I have several PhD students mostly from East Africa.
I'm a fellow of the Higher Education Academy
Research
My main interest lies in health system research on how to best organise and design care structures to support quality maternal, reproductive and newborn health. I lead and co-lead several projects in Africa (Tanzania, Uganda, Mozambique) and Asia (India) focussing on quality improvement through quality management approaches, capacity building, and health system strengthening. I also work on indicator development to support the evaluation for maternal and newborn health care. I’m at present the co-chair of the WHO MoNITOR committee aiming to improve the tracking for maternal and newborn health.
In relation to methods, I have a strong experience in large-scale evaluations such as cluster-randomised trials and data collection based on household surveys and facility-based records. I have been leading and co-leading several studies including a cluster-randomised trial of Helping Mothers Survive Bleeding after Birth Study training intervention in Tanzania and Uganda, the EU-funded “Improving Quality Management Using Information Power (EQUIP)” and the endline evaluation of the Improving Newborn Survival in Southern Tanzania (INSIST) study which included a 200,000 household survey in 2013.
My present work at the school is to evaluate a large collaborative quality improvement intervention in Telangana and Andhra Pradesh in secondary and tertiary, private and public hospitals.