Health Equilogues | Institute of Public Health Bengaluru
Health Equity Network India (HENI) – the 20th Equilogues

Health Equity Network India (HENI) – the 20th Equilogues

Health Equity Network India (HENI) – the 20th Equilogues

Date

16-December-2022 Friday

Time

3:30-5:00 PM IST

Theme: How do we build the world we want?

Multi-Country Perspectives on Social Participation for Universal Health Coverage

 Background: Social participation or citizen engagement has become an integral part of health systems strengthening since its rise in prominence as part of the Alma Ata declaration on “Health for All” in 1978. Evidence linking social participation to improve health outcomes and health systems is emerging and acting as a critical tool for advocacy around the policy imperative for governments to institutionalize and strengthen social participation as part of health programs. History bears testimony to the central role that the civil society has been playing in advocating for and facilitating citizen engagement in health. There have been numerous attempts globally at institutionalizing and operationalizing citizen engagement in health programs. Several of these experiences in countries have been documented whereas for many such documentation is emerging.

The Civil Society Engagement Mechanism (CSEM) for UHC2030 is partnering with The George Institute for Global Health (TGI) as part of a project entitled “Social Participation for Health: Engagement, Research, and Empowerment (SPHERE)” to document experiences of social participation and community action in health and support advocacy efforts of civil society partners in Argentina, Vietnam and Kenya towards advancing citizen engagement and social participation for health linking up to UHC. With Universal Health Coverage (UHC) occupying the central stage in policy and advocacy related to health systems governance and the delivery of health services, such documentation offers lessons and opportunities for cross-learning on how social participation could be leveraged for progressively achieving UHC.

The 20th Equilogue of the Health Equity Network India (HENI) will bring together researchers and practitioners who – based on their involvement in research, advocacy, and action related to citizen engagement – will share perspectives, learnings, challenges, and the way forward for Social Participation for health (SPH) in their country contexts and deliberate on the role of SPH within the UHC discourse.

Format: The webinar will begin with a team from The George Institute for Global Health India showcasing its documentation work on the history of institutionalizing community participation and action in health under India’s National Health Rural Mission (NRHM) using the oral history methodology of a Witness Seminar.

This will be followed by a fireside chat hosted by Dr. David Peiris from TGI with representatives from the civil society deeply involved with work encompassing social participation and movement-building on UHC and strengthening community-led action for health reform.

Agenda:

Speakers

Hari Sankar

Hari Sankar

Research Fellow – Health Systems and Equity, The George Institute for Global Health, India

Dr. Hari Sankar D is a qualitative research fellow at the George Institute for Global Health India (TGI). He has a Master’s in public health and a Bachelor’s degree in Ayurveda. He has worked for more than six years in health systems and operation research focusing on primary health care. He is trained in disease surveillance and later gained field experience in implementation research. His current research interest is focused on developing a monitoring framework for tracking health system performance indicators and underlying inequalities in the health system of Kerala. 

Misimi Kakoti

Misimi Kakoti

Research Officer, The George Institute for Global Health, India

Misimi Kakoti is currently working as a Research Officer (RO) at TGI. Her research interests lie in the intersection of gender, rights, and equity in health policy and systems. She has been primarily involved with the documentation work on community action in health in India with the method of Witness Seminar, piloting the 8Quity checklist tool, and the CEDAW implementation review project at TGI. She has previously worked with the Rapid Evidence Synthesis Unit at TGI. She also supports the Secretariat of the Health Equity Network India (HENI). Prior to this, she worked with the Tata Institute of Social Sciences and ActionAid India.

Abhijit Das

Abhijit Das

Founder and Managing Trustee, Centre for Health and Social Justice

Dr. Abhijit Das is the Founder and Managing Trustee of the Centre for Health and Social Justice, a policy research and advocacy institution on health and human rights, and gender equality. Dr. Abhijit is a medical doctor with 35 years of experience in grassroots work, training, research, and policy advocacy in the field of public health. He is the founder member of MenEngage, a global alliance of NGOs working with men and boys on gender equality, and Co-Convenor of COPASAH (Community of Practitioners on Accountability and Social Action in Health), a global health rights and social accountability network, and member of the Advisory Group on Community Action (AGCA). He is a Clinical Associate Professor, the Department of Global Health, University of Washington.

Smitha Sadasivan

Smitha Sadasivan

Smitha Sadasivan is a social activist passionate about the accessibility and inclusivity of persons with disabilities in all domains including civil political socio-cultural, financial legal, and administrative contexts. She is a member of the Civil Society Engagement Mechanism for UHC 2030, while also serving on the Steering Committee of the UHC 2030 initiative overall. In her native state of Tamil Nadu, she serves on the State Advisory Board for Persons with Disabilities under the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, the Disability Rights Alliance. At the national level, she is a member of the Multiple Sclerosis Society of India and the Election Commission. Smitha has degrees in English Literature and Psychology.

Nguyen Thuy Linh

Nguyen Thuy Linh

Deputy Director, Center for Supporting Community Development Initiatives (SCDI)

The Centre for Supporting Community Development Initiatives (SCDI) is a Vietnamese NGO, well-known for its leading role in advocacy for marginalized populations’ access to health and fostering national networks of key populations and other community networks in Vietnam.

In 2015, Linh joined SCDI to develop the Children and Youth program and has led various interventions and advocacy efforts on drug harm reduction and HIV prevention for young drug users, sexual and reproductive health and rights for young women and adolescent girls, building resilience, increasing access to health and education for disenfranchised children. She also provides supervision for the Harm reduction and Addiction Treatment program and the Communication and Social Mobilization team.

Before SCDI, Linh sat in the core team laying the stepping stones for the first Global Fund-supported project on HIV/AIDS led by civil society in Vietnam, facilitating capacity building of community-based organizations and key populations networks and their engagement in advocacy for enabling environment for civil society participation in the HIV response.

Justin Koonin

Justin Koonin

Co-Chair, UHC2030 Steering Committee; President, AIDS Council of New South Wales

Justin is co-chair of the Steering Committee of UHC2030, the international multi-stakeholder partnership for universal health coverage, and is a member of multiple WHO expert panels. At a national level, Justin is president of ACON (AIDS Council of New South Wales), Australia’s largest community organisation dedicated to HIV/AIDS prevention, care, and support, as well as to the health of sexuality and gender-diverse people more broadly. He is Distinguished Fellow and Honorary Professorial Fellow at The George Institute and Adjunct Associate Professor in the Faculty of Medicine and Health at the University of New South Wales, as well as a Fellow of the Australian Institute of Company Directors. Justin’s training is in the field of pure mathematics, and he currently works as an investment analyst.

David Peiris

David Peiris

Director, Global Primary Health Care Program; Co-Director, Centre for Health Systems Science

David is the Director of the Global Primary Health Care Program (Better Care) and Co-Director of the Centre for Health Systems Science. He is a Professor in the Faculty of Medicine, UNSW Sydney, and works clinically as a GP in Sydney.

David joined the Institute in 2006 and leads the Better care program at the Institute. This program focuses on SDG 3 – especially SDGs 3.4 and 3.8. The goal is to overcome the challenges of delivering affordable, high-quality health services and programs to communities across the globe. It is underpinned by health systems science, a dynamic and emerging discipline that includes health services research, health policy and systems research, and implementation science.

David has published extensively in areas related to health systems research and leads several grants testing innovative strategies to improve access to high-quality primary health care with a particular focus on under-served populations. He was the 2015-2016 Australian Harkness Fellow in Healthcare policy, based at Harvard School of Public Health where he conducted a national study of the changes to healthcare delivery systems associated with President Obama’s reforms.

He has been a board member of the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners National Faculty of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Health and sits on several government, non-government, and research advisory committees. He was the elected co-chair of the Global Alliance for Chronic Diseases committee for hypertension control from 2012 to 2015.

Sixteenth webinar in the Equilogues

Sixteenth webinar in the Equilogues

Time

3.00 PM – 5.00 PM

Date

14-August-2020

Title:

“Differential Experience to COVID-19 and its Control Measures in India”

Speakers:

  1. Md. Gufran Alam from Aman Biradari Trust (New Delhi) 
  2. Rohini Chhari from Bhoomi Gramotthan Evam Shabhagi Gramin Vikas Sanstha, Morena (Madhya Pradesh) 
  3. Lilawati Waghare from Amhi Aamchya Aarogya SathiGadhchiroli (Maharashtra) 
  4. C. Mahadeva from Zilla Budakattu Girijana Abhivruddhi Sangha 
  5. Atish Indrekar from Budhan Theatre 
  6. Dilfaraz from SAMARA
Context setting by Rakhal Gaitonde, HENI Steering Group member and Professor at  Sree Chitra Tirunal Institute for Medical Science and Technology, Trivandrum and one of the authors of the recent paper on BMJ Global Health titled Bridging a false dichotomy in the COVID-19 response: a ‘public health’ approach to the lockdown debate.
Moderated by Prashanth NS, HENI Secretariat member and Faculty lead at Health Equity Cluster, Institute of Public Health, Bengaluru.

“learning together” workshop-cum-webinar to collectively understand the differential effects of COVID-19 on individuals and communities. Members from underrepresented and marginalized communities will share their community’s experience of living through the pandemic and the lockdown’s impact on livelihood.

It will kindle discussions among the participants on the following key questions:
  1. What can we learn about the pandemic’s experience in particular individuals/communities/contexts?
  2. What brought about such a vulnerability in the first place?
  3. How could we mitigate the effects of such vulnerability in similar contexts?

Gender Inequities

Gender Inequities

The Health Equity Network India (HENI) secretariat at IPH Bengaluru is pleased to announce the thirteenth webinar in the Equilogues series in May 2019.

Theme: Gender Inequities in Publicly Funded Health Insurance Schemes

Summary of the talk: In this webinar, the speaker unravels gender inequities in social protection mechanisms for health and challenges the gender neutrality stance of publicly funded health insurance schemes (PFHIS).  She discusses the several gender-based barriers in the pathway to access healthcare under the PFHIS drawing from her recently completed a doctoral study on Tamil Nadu’s Chief Minister’s Comprehensive Health Insurance Scheme. Concepts such as ‘household’, ‘access’ and ‘coping’ are revisited using a gender lens. 

About the speaker: Rajalakshmi RamPrakash is a researcher and a social activist on gender and health-based out of Chennai. She has a Masters in Social Work and a Doctorate in Social Sciences from Tata Institute of Social Sciences. She has been involved in several research studies on themes intersecting gender with sexual and reproductive health, law, ethics, health insurance and health systems. She is a member of Jan Swasthya Abhiyan, Gender & Evaluation Community and is currently with Loyola Institute of Business Administration (LIBA), Chennai. 

Speaker

Rajalakshmi RamPrakash

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Affiliation

Date

7-May-2019

Time

3.00 pm – 4.00 pm

Venue

Institute of Public Health, Bengaluru

health research priority-setting

health research priority-setting

Theme:

Engaging communities in health research priority-setting is a key means of setting research topics and questions of relevance and benefit to them. But communities, especially those considered disadvantaged and marginalised, rarely have a say in the agendas and priorities of the very health research projects that aim to help them.

How can researchers and communities share power and ownership when setting priorities for health research projects? An “ethical toolkit” is being developed to help researchers and their partners design inclusive priority-setting processes for health research projects. The toolkit places community engagement and power-sharing at the heart of health research priority-setting. It is a reflective project planning aid for use before priority-setting is undertaken for a health research project. It consists of 3 worksheets and a companion document.

In today’s workshop, the ethical toolkit will be introduced to workshop participants and they will be able to give comments and feedback. Then workshop participants will have the opportunity to apply the toolkit to their current/upcoming health research projects in small groups. (The toolkit is currently not publicly available but will be provided to participants at
the workshop.)

About the speaker

Dr Bridget Pratt is a Research Fellow in the Centre for Health Equity at the School of Population and Global Health at the University of Melbourne. Her work focuses on the ethics of global health research and health systems research, with a focus on social and global justice. She develops ethical guidance
for global health research in relation to multiple areas: priority-setting, governance, capacity development, community engagement, provision of ancillary care, research translation, benefit-sharing, and data sharing.

The event is organised by the health equity cluster at IPH Bengluru and is supported by the Wellcome Trust/DBT India Alliance fellowship to Dr. Prashanth N S

India Alliance Logo

Speaker

Dr Bridget Pratt

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Affiliation

School of Population and Global Health, University of Melbourne

Date

19-April-2019

Time

10:00 am – 3.00 pm

Venue

Institute of Public Health, Bengaluru

3009, II-A Main, 17th Cross, KR Rd, Siddanna Layout,
Banashankari Stage II, Banashankari,
Bengaluru, Karnataka 560070

Eleventh webinar in the Equilogues

Eleventh webinar in the Equilogues

The Health Equity Cluster at IPH Bengaluru is now the secretariat for the newly launched Health Equity Network India (HENI) and is pleased to announce the eleventh webinar in the Equilogues series in January 2019. Do block your calendar for this date and come join us in an engaging conversation on health inequities in India.

Theme: Social exclusion and health of Muslim communities in Maharashtra

About the Speaker:

Dr. Sana Contractor is a public health researcher working with the Centre for Health and Social Justice in New Delhi, India. She has a masters degree in public health from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and has worked in the field for the past 10 years. Her interest lies in exploring the inter-linkages between various social inequities and health. This talk is based on work that she did with CEHAT in Mumbai.

Speaker

Dr. Sana Contractor

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Affiliation

Centre for Health and Social Justice in New Delhi, India

Date

03-Jan-2019

Time

11.00 Am – 12.00 pm
Tenth webinar in the Equilogues series

Tenth webinar in the Equilogues series

Institute of Public Health Bengaluru is pleased to announce the tenth webinar in the Equilogues series which was started by the Achutha Menon Centre for Health Science Studies, Sree Chitra Tirunal Institute for Medical Sciences and Technology as part of their projet Closing the Gap: Health Equity Research Initiative in India. Please find attached the webinar announcement for the same.

Theme: Inclusion of minorities in public services in India

Upendra Bhojani at the Institute of Public Health (Bengaluru) led the India part of a multi-country collaborative project that aimed at building local network of researchers/practitioners/policymakers that can address social inclusion of ethnic and religious minorities in public services. Drawing on the findings from a scoping review of literature and a series of stakeholders consultations in Karnataka, he will briefly highlight the role of inclusive policies (esp in areas of education, health, governance, employment) in enhancing inclusion of minorities as well as gaps in our knowledge.

About the Speaker:

Upendra Bhojani is a Faculty and Wellcome Trust/DBT India Alliance Intermediate Fellow at the Institute of Public health, Bengaluru (IPH). He graduated as a dentist and did his postgraduate and doctoral degree in public health. He has been with IPH for over 10 years now and currently leads a Cluster on Chronic Health Conditions and Public Policy. His research and advocacy interests include non-communicable diseases, tobacco control, intersectoral actions for health, health equity and governance.

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Affiliation

Institute of Public Health, Bengaluru

Date

25-Oct-2018

Time

11.00 Am – 12.00 pm

Venue

Institute of Public health
#250, 2nd C Main, 2nd C Cross,
Girinagar Ist  Phase,
Bengaluru – 560085