Patience A. Afulani, MPH ’11, PhD ‘15

Dr. Patience Afulani is an Associate Professor in the Obstetrics, Gynecology, & Reproductive Sciences and Epidemiology & Biostatistics departments at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). Her primary research centers on the social and health system factors underlying inequities in reproductive, maternal, neonatal, and child health, with a special interest in person-centered care.

Dr. Afulani is the Principal Investigator of the Person-Centered Equity Lab at UCSF, where she leads several research projects, including the “Caring for Providers to Improve Patient Experience” cluster-randomized control trial in Ghana and Kenya. Her research in Ghana, Kenya, and the United States has included examining sources of disparities in the use and quality of maternal health services, developing tools to measure person-centered reproductive health care, examining health workforce wellbeing, and designing and evaluating interventions to improve maternal and neonatal health. Dr. Afulani developed the person-centered maternity care scale that is now used around the globe, and more recently, the person-centered prenatal and postnatal care scales. She co-led the quality-of-care workgroup to revise the Global Emergency Obstetric and Newborn Care framework and the patient-centered care task team of the WHO Life Course Quality of Care Metrics working group; and served on several WHO working and technical advisory groups.

She is a member of the Merck for Mothers Global Advisory Board. Dr. Afulani earned her medical degree (MBChB) from the University of Ghana in 2007, and MPH and PhD in Community Health Sciences from the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health in 2011 and 2015, respectively.