Conversations on Health Policy

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29 Sep: Specialist Skills for Community Health Centres – Breaking through the brick wall

The chronic shortfall of specialist skills in CHCs, cripples our ability to universalize comprehensive primary health care. Such skills are essential to provide referral support and continuity of care to primary care providers and patients. The persistence of the problem and the failure of many efforts to address this shortfall should lead us to introspect on basic design flaws. Drawing on national and international experience, we discuss how this gap can and must be addressed and that too on a priority basis…

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03 Sep: Grounds for Optimism

We are drawing attention to this recent publication from the regional WHO. In this introduction we highlight one context – the shift from selective to comprehensive care. We hope these case stories help the reader understand the complex nature of this shift, and provides grounds for optimism, that despite the challenges, such a change is feasible…..

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10 Aug: Re-discovering the Employees State Insurance (ESI) Scheme in Post-Covid Times.

The ESI is an amazing institution covering over 10% of the population. The ESI is conceptualized within a health rights framework and offers a basket of benefits that no other insurance programme even attempts. Yet when experts talk of UHC or publicly funded health insurance, the ESI is almost never mentioned. Performance in terms of delivery of benefits is poor, but this is not due to lack of funds, as the ESI has a huge surplus. This conversation is about how ESI must be saved, re-vitalized and expanded, as part of the struggle to achieve the right to healthcare and Health for All. And given some of the directions of reform that are being pushed, it it is also about how not to lose an asset that we never knew we had.

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28 Jul: Nutrition and Growth Standards – Seeing Beyond the Smoke and Mirrors

Last year, the ICMR initiated a process re-revisit WHO’s weight and height standards for children on grounds that these are not appropriate in the Indian context. But is this valid? Are current growth standards overstating India’s malnutrition crisis? In this conversation, Dr Yogesh Jain talks to Prof. Rakesh Lodha, AIIMS and Dr Pavitra Mohan,BHS, ( all of leading pediatric practitioners and academicians with experience in public policy) to clarify the issues and concerns underlying the current controversy and the values and goals that should inform our choice of standards.

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30 Jun: Getting reliable mortality and burden of disease estimates – So near but yet so far!!!

India has the necessary digitized data systems in place to provide us with the mortality data we need, but yet due to some critical disconnects, we remain reliant on external global institutions for even state and national burden of disease estimates. In this conversation Dr. Chalapathi Rao, discusses how it is possible for state governments to generate reliable annual district level mortality information- even in the short run.

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10 Jun: Why is Progress towards Universal Health Coverage so far off track? Implementation Failure or Gaps in the Strategy?

“Universal Health Coverage” was once hailed as “the single most important concept that public health has to offer.” ( Margaret Chan, 2012). But , even by WHO and UN assessments, it is off track, across most low and middle income countries !! In this conversation we look beyond implementation issues and disruption due the covid pandemic, to more basic questions about UHC as a strategy and as a discourse.”

Seventy-sixth World Health Assembly, Geneva, Switzerland, 21 - 30 May 2023

24 May: What is happening at the 77th World Health Assembly- 2024? ……And an Introduction to the WHO Tracker

Global Health Policies in an unequal world are more the resultant of political dynamics than of the public good. Introducing the WHO Tracker, a unique and powerful tool created by PHM, which empowers public health professionals, practitioners and policy makers in developing nations to understand and intervene in global policy setting and its adaptation to local needs. Use this to follow the ongoing discussions in the 77th World Health Assembly at Geneva.

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08 May: The Quality Conundrums of public health services – of NQAS and beyond!!

We know that markets do not work to assure quality health care!! But what does? Over the last 15 years, the NHM has developed the National Quality Assurance System (NQAS) to assure quality in public health services. What is NQAS? Is it working? Is it scaleable? Is it enough? This conversation between Yogesh Jain and Sundararaman, the 8th in our series, explores the answers!!