Kat Tumlinson
Ph.D., Associate Professor (she/hers), Health Policy and Management
ktumlin@email.unc.edu
Curriculum Vitae
Google Scholar Profile
PubMed Publications
ORCID iD
Katherine Tumlinson (she/her) studies how health systems can help people obtain contraceptive care that aligns with their preferences. Her work focuses on the barriers clients encounter within healthcare facilities, including provider-imposed restrictions, informal fees, disrespectful care, and commodity constraints. She works primarily in the Global South, using rigorous mixed-methods and experimental research to improve person-centered family planning care and support contraceptive autonomy.
Dr. Katherine Tumlinson (she/her) is an epidemiologist and demographer whose work sits at the intersection of population health, global reproductive health, health systems, and contraceptive autonomy. She is an Associate Professor in the Department of Health Policy and Management at the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health and a faculty member at the Carolina Population Center. Her research focuses on how family planning service quality, provider behavior, health system accountability, and commodity availability shape contraceptive access, method preference, and reproductive autonomy in the Global South.
Dr. Tumlinson has served as principal investigator on studies in Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa, including large-scale household surveys, facility-based assessments, provider interviews, client exit interviews, mystery client studies, unannounced facility visits, qualitative interviews, and cluster randomized trials. Her work has documented how provider-imposed restrictions, informal fees, disrespectful care, absenteeism, method denial, and supply constraints can limit access to high-quality contraceptive services, especially for young, unmarried, and nulliparous women. She has also shown that conventional measures of family planning quality often fail to capture the full range of service-delivery barriers that shape contraceptive experiences and outcomes.
Her current research portfolio includes experimental and mixed-methods studies of social accountability, person-centered contraceptive care, drone-based medical commodity delivery, and provider-facing interventions to reduce nonclinical method denial and improve receipt of preferred contraceptive methods. In Kenya, she recently led a county-wide cluster randomized trial evaluating Community Score Card and Citizen Report Card interventions across public-sector facilities in Kisumu County. In Madagascar, she led a cluster randomized impact evaluation of drone delivery for essential medical commodities in remote public-sector health facilities. Her ongoing work uses the Multiphase Optimization Strategy to develop and test scalable, cost-informed interventions that address provider values, motivation, workplace norms, and mentorship as drivers of family planning service quality.
Before entering academia, Dr. Tumlinson worked as a family planning service provider and reproductive health educator and advocate. These experiences continue to inform her applied research agenda and her commitment to producing evidence that is useful for health systems, program implementers, and policy makers. Across her work, she uses rigorous quantitative methods, integrated qualitative approaches, implementation science, economic evaluation, and sustained collaboration with in-country partners to ensure that research questions, measures, and dissemination strategies are grounded in local priorities and responsive to the needs of the people and health systems her work aims to support.
Associated Projects
- Delivering on Universal Health Coverage Promises in Madagascar
- Improving dialogue and accountability with a youth-led community score card in Western Kenya
- Non-Preferred Contraceptive Method Use in Low-Resourced Settings: Exploring Inappropriate Medical Contraindications and Person-Centered Care
- Randomized Controlled Trial to Address Unintended Pregnancy Rates in Low Resource Settings
- Service Delivery Factors Influencing Contraceptive Use Dynamics in Developing Countries: A Mixed-Methods and Cross-Disciplinary Approach