Lisa Thompson, RN, PhD, FNP
Associate Professor, UCSF School of Nursing
Thursday, March 3 2016, 6 pm (Meet and greet with food at 5:30 pm)
Cory Hall 540 (note room change)
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Premature or just too small? Tools to assess and address prematurity in low income countries are few and far between
Globally, the leading cause of death in children under 5 is complications from preterm birth. More than 15 million babies are born prematurely each year, and nearly 1 million die within the first month of life. Efforts to assess and address prematurity in low-income settings are hindered by lack of low-cost, affordable technologies that can be implemented by community health workers and semi-skilled health professionals. We need to develop new tools to: 1) identify women at risk of preterm births, 2) identify, treat and refer preterm infants born at home and 3) ultimately, encourage facility-based deliveries where preterm infants will receive care. In this talk, I will review potential and proven interventions to detect preterm infants that have been proposed around the world. I will discuss the application and limitations of these interventions, using rural Guatemala as a case study.
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Dr. Lisa Thompson, RN, FNP, PhD is an associate professor in the School of Nursing at UCSF and the program director for the doctoral program in Global Health Studies at the University of California, San Francisco. She received her master’s and doctorate degrees in Environmental Health Studies from the University of California, Berkeley. Dr. Thompson’s research focuses on environmental health disparities that contribute to low birth weight and adverse perinatal outcomes. She was recently funded by the National Institutes of Health to investigate the impact of a gas stove/behavior intervention on personal exposures to household air pollution among pregnant women and their neonates in rural Guatemala. She is principal investigator for a project funded by Grand Challenges Canada (Stars in Public Health, Phase I grant) and partners with co-investigators at Universidad del Valle, and a social enterprise, GenteGas in urban Guatemala. Using a market-based approach, GenteGas is training a cadre of women entrepreneurs to distribute gas stoves and to discuss gas safety and health messages. In 2008, she received the Blum Award for Distinguished Social Action from her alma mater, UC Berkeley School of Public Health, for her work with rural indigenous communities in Guatemala and her work as a family nurse practitioner at La Clínica de la Raza in Oakland, California. Dr. Thompson is the recipient of a UCSF Faculty Development Award (2008-9), the UCSF CTSI KL2 Research Scholar Award (2011-2015), and the UCSF Burke Family Global Health Faculty Award (2008-2013).
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