Dr Karlijn Joling, VU Medical Centre

Postdoctoral researcher

Karlijn Joling (1982) studied health science and clinical epidemiology at Erasmus University Rotterdam. In 2012, she obtained her PhD focussing on depression and anxiety in family caregivers of persons with dementia at the VU University Medical Centre Amsterdam. A large part of this research involved an evaluation of the (cost-) effectiveness of a family meetings intervention for family caregivers of persons with dementia. After finishing her thesis, she combined research with a position as a policy officer at the VUmc Alzheimer Centre where she was involved in the development of the Dutch national dementia strategy. Karlijn currently works as a postdoctoral researcher at the VUmc department of General Practice and Elderly Care Medicine and is involved in several ongoing research projects on dementia care in community and long term care settings.

During her postdoc, she obtained two fellowship grants from the Dutch Alzheimer’s Society to work at Bangor University in Wales for several months and started collaborating with them on resilience in dementia caregivers and the benefits of art for people with dementia. Since 2015, she is leading a large project that aims to identify best practices in dementia care trajectories by extracting and linking data on the quality and cost of care from routine care registries. Her main expertise is in quantitative data-analyses. She has experience with evaluating the (cost-)effectiveness of complex interventions and analysis of observational data (e.g. prevalence, incidence, risk profiles, diagnostic accuracy).