Doris Schaeffer is a longstanding Fellow at the Hertie School. She has been Professor of Public Health at Bielefeld University since 1997, where she headed the department of Nursing Science and Health Services Research from 1977 to 2018.
She worked at the at the Free University Berlin, Institute for Social Medicine, and Berlin Social Science Center (WZB) in the department of public health, among others. She has been a visiting researcher at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) and visiting professor at the University of Vienna and was part of the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute on Health Promotion Research at the University of Vienna. Her core research areas have been her work on chronic illness, patient centered care and user involvement, patient information and health services research. Furthermore, she has been working on “health literacy” for well over ten years. In close collaboration with Professor Jürgen Pelikan, one of the European founding fathers of the topic, she introduced the topic in and established it as a new field of research both at the University of Bielefeld and in Germany. She conducted many of the studies and surveys that can be deemed the foundation of the field in Germany and has contributed considerably to its conceptual development. She is an active part of the WHO action network M-POHL not least as the primary investigator for Germany.
As a Hertie fellow she has brought research at the University of Bielefeld and the Hertie School together. In that context, Doris Schaeffer is the initiator and spokesperson of the National Action Plan on Health Literacy (Nationaler Aktionsplan Gesundheitskompetenz), which is jointly hosted and researched at both universities. Moreover, she initiated the work of a consortium (HLS-PROF Consortium) including Professor Mujaheed Shaikh and other researchers at the Hertie School and the University of Bielefeld as well as experts from Austria (GÖG) and Switzerland (Careum).
Contact: https://ekvv.uni-bielefeld.de/pers_publ/publ/PersonDetail.jsp?personId=133014
