Dr Karina Kielmann

Karina is a medical anthropologist and a health systems researcher with 20 years of experience working on tuberculosis (TB) care.  As of 2022, she is Professor and Head of the Equity and Health Unit in the Department of Public Health, Institute of Tropical Medicine, Antwerp.  Her Unit aims to contribute to better understanding of the root causes of health inequities and development of strategies to improve access, acceptability, quality, and accountability of health systems and services to communities, particularly for individuals in marginalized and precarious positions in both the global South and North.  Her own research has used ethnographic and qualitative methods to examine the translation of health policies and guidelines at the level of local health systems and the interface with communities they serve (India, South Africa, Zambia, Latvia, United Kingdom).   

Her work highlights the need to find ways to validate patients’ lived experience of illness, being on treatment, and navigating care systems as critical evidence for strengthening health systems responsiveness and accountability  to individuals with TB, drug-resistant TB, and TB-related co-morbidities.  Recent work has also examined how we can improve on health systems readiness assessments for decentralized and integrated care for DR-TB and TB-NCD co-morbidities by incorporating patient and provider experiential knowledge in the tools we use.