Researcher profile

Karina Kielmann

I am a Canadian-German medical anthropologist with 25 years of experience in research, teaching, and developing capacity for critically applied social science research in global health. My focus is on strengthening health systems and embedding social science approaches in health policy and implementation research with a particular focus on health systems readiness, responsiveness, accountability. My long-term research experience in India, east Africa, and southern Africa allowed me to develop expertise in applying systems thinking, organizational theory and implementation science to the study of health systems performance. I offer a critical social science perspective on mechanistic views of the health system, privileging a lens on the system as a social institution and the translation of health policies and guidelines at the level of local health systems and the community interface. Most recently, my work has addressed the health needs of migrant, ethnic minority, and mobile individuals with particular attention to infectious disease and non-communicable disease (NCD) co-morbidities that necessitate innovative health systems strategies. Across both LMIC and selected high-income settings, my work examines why health systems interventions seeking to optimise care outcomes may fail to consider health care professional adaptive practices and patients’ care value preferences, and how these strategies can be more equitably and sensitively developed with these aspects in mind.