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Alumni Spotlight: Freda Koomson
Alumni Spotlight: Freda Koomson
Ask many graduate students how they answered questions during their admissions interview – and they won’t remember, but now more than a decade after her interview, Freda Koomson (’13, MHA) remembers telling Dr. Michael Lin she had a passion for global health care management and was determined to make her mark. Her goal: Contributing to strengthening health system changes in her maternal homeland – Liberia, West Africa.
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Koomson joined HPM in 2011, and in 2013 won top prize in the master’s category at the School of Public Health’s annual Dean’s Day competition for her thesis “Management & Policy Analysis of Liberia’s National Health Plan 2011-2021.”
on set out to make her goal a reality, first working with a health-oriented NGO that was the leading implementation partner of a National Community Health Assistant program. She also worked as a consultant to USAID, evaluating the efficacy, success, and challenges of the Partnership Advancing Community Services.
In 2016 she relocated to Monrovia, Liberia and most recently worked with the Yale University School of Medicine’s Office of Global Health as part of a health systems strengthening consortium poised to rehabilitate and grow the health care workforce in Liberia following the Ebola virus epidemic that had plagued the country for two years.
From 2017 until 2020, Koomson worked with Yale as a postgrad Senior Health Management associate where she helped build a program for side-by-side mentorship with hospital staff and health care administrators and supervisors. The solutions-oriented approach focused on step-by-step problem solving. The project focused on several areas of quality improvement by creating performance management systems, strengthening management of medical records, and promoting better management and inventory of the hospital pharmacy.
Her work also focused on improving the quality of care and patient experience for patients living with HIV under the Human Resource & Service Administration PEPFAR Grant- Rebuilding Resilient Health Systems (RRHS).
In addition to her work with the hospital, Koomson was pivotal in creation, launch and maintain the certificate in health systems program at the University of Liberia. She also advocated for the approval of a bachelors program in public health that would serve as a precursor to the creation of the School of Public Health at the university, where she is currently a lecturer for the Health Systems MPH program.
