Strengthening Health Systems and Programmes
The organization of health services is one of our main areas of interest. This includes both efforts at strengthening different building blocks of the health system as well as the studying different aspect of health program implementation. In all these studies we take what is called a “ health systems approach.”
A good example of a health systems approach to look at one specific health programme is the case study that was done for the State Human Rights Commission in Maharashtra in 2018. Case Study: The full report is presented here. “An Enquiry into Deaths of Newborns in Nashik , 2018 Presented to Department of Public Health April 6th 2018 On the directions of State Human Rights Commission By team of Prof T Sundararaman and others” . This is a useful case study to teach a systems approach to assessing a public health program/problem.
We will be adding more such problem-solving studies over the coming few months.
In terms of programme evaluation, two important studies are the program evaluation of the Program evaluation of the Janani Suraksha Yojna programme Rajani Ved, Thiagarajan Sundararaman, Garima Gupta1, Geetha Rana et al,. Another is the evaluation of the ASHA programme and important step in our learning and which influenced the subsequent evolution of the ASHA programme in a significant manner. This is presented as part of the section on community health workers.
Another interesting case study, is “Case Study Access to Diagnostics Services in Public Health Sector, Maharashtra” ( T. Sundararaman et al ) that was presented in a workshop. This was an enquiry into how this recent form of public private partnerships was working out. Presented in Workshop on Universal Access to Diagnostics under NHM organized with NHSRC, it was ,used to inform policy, it was never formally published.
One interesting reading from those days is Towards Universal Health Coverage: Reproductive health, and child health and nutrition in India: meeting the challenge. Position Paper on RCH in India.
Another publication of interest- again approaching child health with a systems approach is the paper Role of district health management teams in child health strategies.
Documentation of the health policy and health systems strengthening work done in Chhattisgarh in the period 2002 to 2007 have not survived or become too dated. Our ability to write critically on it was also limited. Much of these areas of work were covered by work done with NHSRC for NHM. This paper dealing with a proximate child malnutrition that we published was Universalisation of ICDS in Chhattisgarh, published in Economic and Political Weekly. Another was the publication in Lancet on Mitanins.