Category: Public Health
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Can carers decide on assisted suicide
Caring for a chronically ill family member is physically and emotionally taxing. I have seen in such situations people struggling with questions on the larger meaning/purpose of life, death, well-being, happiness and such. The very capacity to love and empathize (either oneself or our loved ones) get tested in such situations. I have heard single…
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Of rainy cities and public health
This is an expanded version of an article published in Sunday Spotlight submission to Deccan Herald dated September 17, 2017 Recognition is famously a passage from ignorance to knowledge The above line is from Amitav Ghosh’s The Great Derangement, his recent meditation on how literature has engaged with climate change and its effects. Ghosh laments the absence of…
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Modi-fying India’s health: Health in the times of India’s new prime minister
This blog was published on the International Health Policies Blog on June 5, 2015 under the same title. It was co-written with Upendra Bhojani, my colleague at IPH, Bangalore These are interesting times in India, no doubt. Our new prime minister, Narendra Modi is ensuring that India’s global reputation as a progressive, multi-cultural and multi-ethnic…
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Studying organisational change in Indian district health systems: end of a PhD journey
On 21st April, 2015 I defended my public health PhD dissertation at Universite Catholique de Louvain in Brussels. I sought to understand organisational change within district health systems in an Indian district. The research was carried out in Tumkur district in southern Karnataka (on which I have blogged a bit). I focused on understanding “change” within…
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Building health policy and systems research capacity in India: the KEYSTONE approach
The last few decades have seen a proliferation of research in the domain of health policy and systems research (HPSR). Major technological advances in medicine and various healthcare innovations have little chances of succeeding if robust country, provincial and local health systems are lacking.