Kitty Bloemenkamp

Professor Kitty W.M. Bloemenkamp is a Maternal Fetal Medicine Specialist and Chair Birth Centre, Wilhelmina’s Children Hospital, University Medical Centre Utrecht, the Netherlands.

Her Residency training programme in Obstetrics, Gynaecology and Reproductive Medicine was followed in Leiden University Medical Centre, Leiden (1997-2002).  Her PhD Thesis: "Oral contraceptives, venous thrombosis and the role of coagulation defects" was at the department of  Clinical Epidemiology. Thereafter she became a Fellow Maternal Medicine, Department of Obstetrics and Fetal Medicine at University College Hospitals, London, United Kingdom (2003). She was appointed as a maternal fetal medicine specialist at the department of Obstetrics of Leiden University Medical Centre (LUMC) (2004-2015).

Her main research interest is “Maternal Health” globally, the health of a woman throughout her (reproductive) lifecycle is investigated.  From preconception, complicated (early) pregnancy, towards delivery, postpartum and consequences of these complications later in life. Especially maternal mortality and morbidity. With special interest in PPH, Covid 19 in pregnancy, maternal vaccination and induction of labour. She has been involved in designing, conducting, analysing and writing articles in several national and international research projects in the field of Obstetrics. Resulting in more than 200 publications in important medical journals. She is at present and has been Principal Investigator of several RCTs, case control, cohortstudies and experimental studies in the field of Maternal Health.

She is the Chairman of Nethoss (Netherlands Obstetric Survey Study, nationwide ongoing registration study), Audit Committee of Maternal Mortality, Netherlands and of INOSS (International Network of Obstetric Survey Systems). She works in close collaboration with the Julius Centre of the UMCU. In these networks she collaborates with many different stakeholders in LMICs and High income countries in order to improve the quality of care for mothers and their newborns by introduction of populationbased registrationsystems,  audit of maternal morbidity and mortality. Implementation of lessons learned into guidelines who are implemented by a bottom up approach. With the support of the UMCU Global Health Grants she is able to help LMICS with capacity building by supervising PhD fellows from LMICs.