Born on Dec 5th, 1958
Lives in Oslo, Norway
Education and professional experience
Hall Skåra holds a Computer Science degree from The Ohio State University. He worked as a computer programmer at Capital University in Columbus, Ohio, before returning to his home country, Norway. There he started working as a capacity and performance analyst for mainframe computers at Norway’s largest insurance company. He was promoted to a managerial position and continued in this position when the IT department was outsourced to IBM. He went through extensive management training with IBM among others in Brussels, Belgium. He also became a certified project manager through the Project Management Institute. He held his management position for approximately ten years before he was diagnosed with pulmonary hypertension. He worked 50% as a project manager for an additional eight years after his diagnosis, before he retired fully from his computer management career in 2014.
PHA Europe position
Hall started doing consultancy work for PHA Europe in 2017. One of his responsibilities has been the “White Spots” program. The aim of the program is to help to establish new pulmonary hypertension patient associations in countries where an association does not exist. Hall then supports the new patient associations during the first years of their existence. The program has turned out to be a success, and now there are just two countries remaining in Europe that have a population over one million citizen that do not have a PH patient association (Moldova and Albania). These countries will probably be included in 2016. The focus will then turn to establishing a structured way to help the existing associations mature. Hall has also used his computer skills by establishing and managing PHA Europe’s internal cloud library (Box).
Other patient advocacy positions
Hall is a founding member and current President of the Norwegian pulmonary hypertension patient association. He has been a conference speaker both in Norway and abroad.
Languages
Hall is a native Norwegian speaker and is fluent in English and the Scandinavian languages. He also has basic knowledge of German.