New Professor within CHILD: Karina Huus

Karina Huus has been promoted to Professor in Nursing Science with focus on children and adolescents since 1 January, 2021.

Karina Huus has begun her career as a pediatric nurse and has worked at the School of Health and Welfare for many years. She has been an active researcher within the research group CHILD since its start. Karina is the program manager for the specialist nursing educations at the Department of nursing and also the Head of Discipline for Disability Science at the Research School of Health and Welfare.

Karina's research is primarily about children's health, children's rights and children with disabilities and their participation in everyday activities. She has worked extensively internationally with researchers from Vietnam, Australia, Canada, Portugal, Taiwan, China and South Africa, among others. Karina has received fund from STINT, together with researchers from Pretoria University in South Africa, to carry out a project which is about participation for children with disabilities. The project has been ongoing for several years, and has resulted in the validation of an instrument Picture my Participation (PMP) which measures participation. With the instrument, parents and children have had the opportunities to show how involved the children are in everyday activities and what enables and what is seen as obstacles for children to be able to participate in activities. The plan is to continue the collaboration with researchers from South Africa and to do further studies with the aim to increase children's participation.

Karina is one of the researchers in the research program Mental health and Participation in Habilitation for Children and Adolescents with Disabilities (CHILD - PMH). The program will examine factors that affect participation with a focus on mental health and services offered to children with disabilities who suffer from mental illness. Another part of Karina's research concerns children who have parents that are deaf and blind, it has been shown that these children may need special support that they do not always receive today.

Karina Huus is also an active researcher at the Institute for Disability Science, which is a collaboration between Jönköping University and Linköping University.