http://www.kit.nl/-/INS/11981/Royal-Tropical-Institute/KIT-Development-P...

Jurrien Toonen, MD, MPH, epidemiologist is a public health specialist focusing on health systems development and health sector reform. He has over 20 years of experience in public health, covering various areas at the interface between policy development and implementation.

Dr Toonen has extensive experience with health reform, particularly integrating cross-cutting issues like gender, community participation, poverty alleviation and environment into general public health activities.

Dr Toonen has worked at national, intermediate and operational levels, in the public, private and NGO sectors, and in translating global initiatives to country level. His experience covers vastly different health systems in three continents - Latin America, Asia and Africa - and includes long-term assignments in Bolivia, Mali and in Ghana where he is currently based. He has evaluated national health plans in several countries. After being involved in sector-wide approaches for health he became progressively more involved in institutional development and overall development cooperation.

At present, Dr Toonen is Team Leader of a KIT team to study the political economy of human resource policy development, Team Leader for KIT support to National Health Insurance Fund in Ghana, and a core group member of the Health Insurance Platform in the Netherlands.

Since January 2009, Dr Toonen has been based as a KIT staff member, in Accra, Ghana for a period of two years.