Amanda Cleeve

Amanda Cleeve

Assistant Professor | Docent
Visiting address: BioMedicum A4, Solnavägen 9, 17165 Solna
Postal address: K6 Kvinnors och barns hälsa, K6 NOGRH Gemzell Danielsson, 171 77 Stockholm
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About me

  • I am an associate professor in global health, and a midwife and abortion provider at Karolinska University Hospital. I have a masters degree in Global Health and my PhD thesis focused on access to and quality of post abortion care in Uganda, focusing on young women and topics such as task sharing, midwifery, reproductive agency, and quality of care https://openarchive.ki.se/xmlui/handle/10616/46753.

    As a postdoctoral researcher I continued focusing on these topics in different settings, and began working more around the issue of self-managed medical abortion and telemedicine. As an assistant professor, my research interconnects multiple research fields, including obstetrics and gynaecology, midwifery, public health, epidemiology, and social science. My work is centered around issues most pertinent to health systems and human rights – specifically the rights of women and girls to decide over their own bodies. My work strives to build health systems that can better meet the multifaceted sexual and reproductive health needs of women and girls and uphold their rights. I work across the low- to high- income country spectrum, always with the aim to improve access to and quality of care and reduce health inequities.

    Current work include:

    • The MPAC IUD project in Uganda aiming to improve access to postabortion IUDs (co-investigator and main supervisor of PhD-student). 
    • The EmpoderAR project in Argentina: A project in which we study self-managed community-based abortion using web-based Respondent driven sampling combined with qualitative research. This is an international collaboration that we conduct together with CEDES and CREP in Argentina, the WHO, Geneva and RIVM in the Netherlands. (project PI)
    • Telemedicine Sweden. RCT and qualitative work on medical abortion via telemedicine (co-investigator and main supervisor of PhD-student). 
    • The QUALI-DEC project (https://www.qualidec.com/en/home-en/) EU-funded implementation science project in four low- and middle-income countries (co-investigator and process evaluation lead)
    • How-Far-is-Too-Far project: Multi-country project led by CART, UBC Canada, on the safety of first trimester medical abortions. (co-investigator) 
    • SISTERs Co-design intervention project in Malawi and Benin. (co-investigator)   

    In the future I wish to expand my work on no-test medical abortion and on the intersection between intimate partner violence and abortion. I have worked and continue to work closely with the department of Sexual and Reproductive Health and Research at the WHO, and the Prevention of Unsafe Abortion (PUA) team. I recently joined the Editorial Board as an Associate Editor for BMC Reproductive Health. https://reproductive-health-journal.biomedcentral.com/ ;  

    Education
    PhD, MSc, RNM

Research

Teaching

  • I regularly teach in the Midwifery program in the department of Womens and Childrens Health. I am the course leader for the course Maternal and Child Health within the Global Health masters program in the Department of Global Public Health, at Karolinska Institutet. I supervise master students in their thesis writing and supervise PhD-students as main and co-supervisor. From August 2024 I sit on the Board for Research Education in the department of Womens and Childrens Health. 

Selected publications

Articles

All other publications

Grants

  • Swedish Research Council
    1 January 2024 - 31 December 2027
    Stillbirths are one of the most depressing realities of our time: Each year 2 million babies die before or during birth. Compassionate care from diagnosis, throughout hospital stay and after discharge – which is standard in high income countries –can mitigate the psychological, social, and economic consequences on parents and midwives and may trigger more open discussions in facilities for improvement work.We aim to co-design and evaluate a culturally sensitive 2-component stillbirth bereavement care intervention addressed to bereaved women and their families as well as maternity providers.This project will harness the research infrastructure of the EU-funded implementation science project ALERT operating in Benin, Malawi, Tanzania and Uganda. Using co-design methodology, we first aim to understand bereaved mothers’ and maternity providers’ perceptions and expectations of stillbirth care. Feedback and reflection meetings we ensure that the intervention is also applicable to the other ALERT countries. The adapted intervention will be implemented and tested using a cluster-randomized design in hospitals of Benin and Malawi. Outcome measures of  bereaved mothers’ mental health and on healthcare providers workplace stress and burnout, confidence to provide stillbirth care as well as the quality of perinatal audits.  The research work should lead to improved evidence on how to break through the negative consequences of dying during birth which affects large parts of the society.
  • How Far Is Too Far?
    Canadian Institute for Health research Project Grant (506362)
    1 January 2024 - 31 December 2027
  • Swedish Research Council
    1 January 2021 - 31 December 2023

Employments

  • Midwife, Gynaecology - Abortion Care, Karolinska University Hospital, 2023-
  • Assistant Professor, Department of Women's and Children's Health, Karolinska Institutet, 2023-2029
  • Assistant Professor, Department of Global Public Health, Karolinska Institutet, 2022-2025

Degrees and Education

  • Docent, Karolinska Institutet, 2025
  • Degree Of Doctor Of Philosophy, Department of Women's and Children's Health, Karolinska Institutet, 2019
  • Postgraduate Diploma In Midwifery, Karolinska Institutet, 2015
  • Degree Of Master Of Medical Science 60 Credits, Karolinska Institutet, 2012

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