Claes Hultling MD, PhD

Claes Hultling, M.D., Ph.D. Associate Professor at the Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm and Founder & CEO of the Spinalis Foundation since 1990. He has spent more than 30 years catering for spinal cord injured in Sweden and in many other places in the world. Claes – a trained anesthesiologist – sustained a spinal cord injury on the last day of May in 1984 in a diving accident. After that, he went and trained in Perth with Sir George Bedbrook and after coming back to Stockholm he started the Spinalis Foundation. Today he works together with the Rehab Station Stockholm in a brand new facility a couple of minutes away from the biggest hospital in Northern Europe – the Karolinska University Hospital, which is connected to the Karolinska Institutet. Claes has started one spinal cord injury unit in Gaborone in Botswana and one in Windhoek in Namibia and is underway of starting one in Lusaka in Zambia.

The Spinalis Foundation has produced 14 Ph.D. dissertations since 1986. The unit has published close to 200 peer review articles during the same time span and has focused on clinical research that corresponds with the most important secondary complications after spinal cord injury – identified by the prevalence group. Today 1,350 spinal cord injured patients rely on the Spinalis clinic for their daily, monthly and yearly medical support; everything from prescribing intermittent catheters to wheelchairs to cushions to drugs. Claes worked as a visiting Professor at Stanford University in Palo Alto 2009-2010.