Edition 11 | July 18, 2022 | |
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Dear Friends,
We are delighted to present to you the next edition of the monthly newsletter by the Lancet Citizens' Commission on Reimagining India’s Health System. This edition focuses on the impact of tribal health security to achieve Universal Health Coverage (UHC) in India, improvements in cancer care treatment, analysis of political motivation as a key driver for UHC, and more. As a Citizens’ Commission, we invite the public to participate, provide input and continue to engage with this new initiative.
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The webinar was a joint Lancet Citizens’ Commission on Reimagining India’s Health System event with SOCHARA and Population Foundation of India. The panelists focused on the need to improve tribal health security for achieving the goal of universal health coverage in India. | | |
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The key to unlocking the dilemma of poor tribal health is culture. No doubt poverty and other factors need to come in, but you can trace many problems to the bypassing of culture. They are a few pockets of tribal health success such as Gadchiroli, Bissamcuttack and Gudalur, which demonstrate a cultural approach, but these are just a few islands in the ocean of tribal health misery, writes Glenn C. Kharkongor. | |
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Like in India, elsewhere in the world too, a calamitous conjunction of the virus and extreme wet weather is taking place. Locust attacks and cyclones are damaging economies, writes K Srinath Reddy.
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Cancer Care Is Improving – But at Different Rates for Different People in India
Newer therapies have transformed the outlook towards cancer from being considered a death sentence to a chronic disabling condition thanks to significantly improved survival rates. Patients now receive multiple lines of treatment that keep the cancer’s growth under check even if the first-line treatment fails, write Parth Sharma and Siddhesh Zadey.
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Covid has led to endothelial dysfunction, resulting in loss of ability of blood vessels to dilate when needed. This can lead to high blood pressure, accelerated atherosclerosis and heart attacks. But fear not as the patient can recover over time, writes K Srinath Reddy.
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Political Motivation as a Key Driver for Universal Health Coverage
The paper finds that healthcare reforms happen in (at least) two stages: the existence and recognition of a national context and a problem, followed by the emergence of political opportunities and motivations that lead political leaders to address the identified problem. This paper distinguishes motivation as a crucial factor for analysis because, in the absence of strong incentives, not every political opportunity leads to an issue receiving attention. Our paper also finds that reforms are motivated by an incoming regime’s need to gain political legitimacy, its political ideology, or a combination of the two, write Sandhya Venkateswaran, Shruti Slaria & Sampriti Mukherjee.
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Commission Members in Spotlight | |
"While healthcare is a team effort education of healthcare professionals takes place in silos. The dissonance between different healthcare professionals and the lack of a space where multidisciplinary healthcare professionals come together and decide a what is feasible model at the local level yet identify good practices that can be scaled up is missing to achieve UHC," says Preethi John, Associate Professor and Deputy Director, UCL Global Business School for Health, Faculty of Population Health Sciences, UCL, London, UK | |  |
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"I feel that acknowledging diversity to bring equity for the population across different caste, religion, income, gender, geography is an important challenge in achieving UHC. Training the Human Resources for Health in India on how to be accountable; and monitoring and evaluation of the existing and future schemes are equally challenging," says Dipanwita Sengupta,Consultant, CMC Vellore
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The Population Council Institute seeks to improve the well-being and health of current and future generations in India and to help achieve a humane, equitable and sustainable balance between people and resources. The Population Council Institute is providing research support to the cross-workstream district-level study on pathways to UHC. | |
We love hearing back from you! Please send your comments, suggestions, and contributions for these newsletters, including research highlights and published features to info@citizenshealth.in
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