Andrea Tenner, MD, MPH

Dr. Andrea (Andi) Tenner is an Associate Professor in the Department of Emergency Medicine and Affiliate Faculty for the Institute for Global Health Sciences at UCSF. She has dedicated her career to building resilient health systems and improving access to quality emergency care for patients in low- and middle-income income countries (LMICs).

Dr. Tenner has significant experience teaching and working abroad, which ranges from public health epidemiological work, to humanitarian response, to education and health system development. She served as core faculty in the first emergency medicine residency in Tanzania and now consults and collaborates with local faculty on research projects and disaster training. She has also served as the Vice Chair for the African Federation for Emergency Medicine (AFEM) Scientific Committee. During her time overseeing isolation units in Sierra Leone during the 2014 Ebola outbreak, she witnessed healthcare systems collapsing because of poor planning for disasters and this spurred her desire to improve system resiliency by improving emergency care systems.

More recently, she has focused on advocacy, research, and collaboration with WHO through her role as a consultant for the WHO Emergency, Trauma and Acute Care programme and the Hospitals Working Group. She served as one of the editors for the WHO Basic Emergency Care (BEC) course, developed educational adjuncts to support the WHO BEC course, and has helped with the development of the WHO Triage tool and standardized emergency and trauma care forms.

She now serves as Co-Director of the UCSF PAHO/WHO Collaborating Centre for Emergency and Trauma Care and is helping WHO develop and evaluate tools to facilitate the development of emergency care systems in LMICs. Dr. Tenner plans to focus her future work on developing an evidence base for emergency care systems and the tools used to support them with a particular focus on building system resiliency against disasters.