Laura Emdal Navne

Main areas of work

Laura Emdal Navne has more than 10 years’ experience of carrying out research and evaluation projects in collaboration with municipalities, regions, patient organisations and universities. In particular, she carries out research on difficult decisions in the health service, e.g. life and death decisions, and the ethical aspects of medical technology. Furthermore, in the past decade she has worked with evaluations and analyses on involvement of patients and relatives in the Danish health service.

In 2017, Laura Emdal Navne completed a 3-year research project on life and death decisions in a Danish neonatal unit. At present, she is a postdoc in a large research project, MeInWe, on ethics in relation to personal medicine, at the Department of Public Health, University of Copenhagen, financed by the Carlsberg Foundation. Since 2013, Laura Emdal Navne has collaborated with the obstetric clinic at the Juliane Marie Centre under Rigshospitalet on various projects involving patient and staff perspectives on critical births. In collaboration with, among others, Rigshospitalet’s neurological unit, herself and other VIVE researchers are involved in documenting how decisions in the health service and the meeting between doctors, patients and parents change, as economic priorities are more and more explicitly put on the agenda in the health service. Among her other projects under VIVE are current evaluations of interventions targeting relatives in a municipal and patient organisation context, and mapping of interventions to prevent infant abandonment. Previously, she has worked with management of user involvement in hospitals, user involvement in rehabilitation, testing of a new fee structure in general practice and experiences abroad with nurse-staffed telephone examination in the medical emergency services.

Methods

With regard to methodology, Laura Emdal Navne has more than 10 years’ experience with qualitative investigations based on field work, including participant observations, interviews and focus groups. Furthermore, she taught the subject Qualitative Methods at the University of Copenhagen from 2013 to 2016, and she is a co-author of the methodology book ”Antropologiske Projekter” (2018).

Background

From 2005-2007, Laura Emdal Navne lived in Greenland, where she carried out research on women’s reproductive decisions regarding contraception, abortion and birth in Greenland. In 2008, she completed he anthropology studies at the University of Copenhagen with a thesis on health anthropology. Right after this, she was employed at the Department of Anthropology, KU, as a teaching assistant, and in 2009 she was employed as project manager in the Danish Institute for Health Services Research (now VIVE).

In the period 2013-2016, Laura Emdal Navne was on leave due to a 3-year PhD project at the Department of Public Health. In the autumn semester of 2015, she was a guest researcher at the Department of Anthropology at New York University. In addition, she has worked with caregiver involvement in rehabilitation, everyday rehabilitation in municipal eldercare, development of emergency units and mapping of patient-directed prevention.