Maria Björk

Maria Björk is a registred nurse and a pediatric nurse. She has worked at a children’s hospital for 15 years, primarily at the pediatric oncology unit. She has worked at Jönköping University since 2015, mainly within the pediatric nursing education.

Maria defended her doctoral thesis in 2008 at Lund University. The title of her thesis is “Living with childhood cancer - Family members’ Experiences and Needs”. She became an associate professor at Jönköping University in 2016.

Maria’s research focuses families and children in need of special care. The primarily focus is pediatric oncology nursing. She has longitudinally studied the entire family where one child within the family is diagnosed with cancer, health in young children diagnosed with cancer, palliative care, personcentered care within the pediatric oncology nursing and also problems and support in everyday life for children with brain tumors using the ICF-CY. She has also focused children with Down syndrome, their general and oral health.

Another research focus is health in families where one parent has deafblindness. Research within this field is sparse. Studies have been conducted focusing the parent with deafblindness, the partner, the child and the entire family.

Due to many Swedish patients and relatives complain about not feeling seen or heard when meeting health care staff an intervention course within the undergraduate nursing program was developed. So was also a coding schema based on Swanson’s theory of caring. The coding schema will be used analyzing video recordings where the nursing students caring behaviors will be coded when meeting a standardized patient at the simulation lab.

Björk is a member of the CHILD research group, an interdisciplinary group at Jönköping University. She is also a member of the Swedish Institute for Disability Research (SIDR), a collaboration between Jönköping University, Örebro University and Linköping University. Since 2018 she is responsible for the academic exchange and cooperation between School of Nursing (SON) at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA. Björk collaborates nationally with researchers within Sweden but also internationally with researcher from Rigshospitalet in Denmark, University of Porto in Portugal and the University of North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill, USA.

She has received research grants from the Swedish childhood cancer foundation, both as a post doc but also to research projects.