Makiko Macdermot

Makiko (Maki) MacDermot has been a health and public health practitioner in several areas over the past three decades. Her areas of interest are health system strengthening, disasters and health, disaster risk management, healthcare evaluation, health inequality reduction both in developing and developed countries, health policy development, implementation, and evaluation.

Maki began her career as a nurse, focused in providing services at the Intensive Therapy Unit (ITU) in several hospitals in Japan and London, in the areas of post cardiac surgeries, respiratory failure, burns, infectious diseases and neurology. Through the years she held roles of increased responsibility and was Nursing Team Leader at The National Hospital for Neurology & Neurosurgery (NHNN) in London, responsible for ITU patients with brain injuries/pre-post neck surgery. In 2014 she transitioned into the public health research area at the JC School of Public Health and Primary Care, The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK), and a year later became an Independent Public Health Consultant, providing lecture contents to deliver two e-learning courses: Research Methodology for Disaster and Medical Humanitarian response and Core Public Health Concepts for Health Emergency and Disaster Risk Management. She later worked as Project Coordinator for International Engagement, Collaborating Centre for Oxford University and CUHK for Disasters and Humanitarian Response (CCOUC) & The Centre for Global Health (CGH), and as Health Care Consultant and Medical Interpreter, helping a newly established Japanese clinic in Hong Kong and Vietnam.

In 2020 Ms. MacDermot became Senior Research Assistant, Accident & Emergency Medicine Academic Unit at The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) on an 18-month project that included eight countries and involved literature reviews, case studies and an expert consensus. She has been Public Health Consultant at the WHO Centre for Health Development, Kobe, Hyogo, coordinating the WHO Health Emergency and Disaster Risk Reduction projects and the research networks. Maki has a Master of Science in Global Health Policy from the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, an undergraduate degree in psychology from Middlesex University, London, and a nursing diploma from the Jichi Medical & Nursing School. She is based in Japan.