Public Health In India

"Public health services, which reduce a population's exposure to disease through such measures as sanitation and vector control, are an essential part of a country's development infrastructure. In the industrial world and East Asia, systematic public health efforts raised labor productivity and life expectancies well before modern curative technologies became widely available, and helped set the stage for rapid economic growth and poverty reduction. The enormous business and other costs of the breakdown of these services are illustrated by the current global epidemic of avian flu, emanating from poor poultry-keeping practices in a few Chinese villages. For various reasons, mostly of political economy, public funds for health services in India have been focused largely on medical services, and public health services have been neglected. This is reflected in a virtual absence of modern public health regulations and of systematic planning and delivery of public health services. Various organizational issues also militate against the rational deployment of personnel and funds for disease control. There is strong capacity for dealing with outbreaks when they occur, but not to prevent them from occurring. Impressive capacity also exists for conducting intensive campaigns, but not for sustaining these gains on a continuing basis after the campaign. This is illustrated by the near eradication of malaria through highly organized efforts in the 1950s, and its resurgence when attention shifted to other priorities such as family planning. This paper reviews the fundamental obstacles to effective disease control in India and indicates new policy thrusts that can help overcome these obstacles. "-- World Bank web site.

Despite rapid advances in modern medicine and state-of-the-art health care services in the private sector, primary health care in India remains inaccessible to a majority of the population. Besides, even policymakers often do not have access to real-time data to fine-tune their policies or design appropriate research and intervention programmes. Drawing on field experiences, this volume brings together scholars and practitioners to examine public health from different perspectives. It discusses practical and applied issues related to the health sector, especially the role of Information and Communications Technology (ICT); participation of civil society; service delivery; quality evaluation; consumer empowerment; data management; and research and intervention. This book will be useful to scholars, students and practitioners of public health in developing countries such as India. It will also interest policymakers, health care professionals, and departments of public health management and those concerned with community medicine.

After years of neglect the last decade has witnessed a surge of interest in the medical history of India under colonial rule. This is the first major study of public health in British India. It covers many previously unresearched areas such as European attitudes towards India and its inhabitants, and the way in which these were reflected in medical literature and medical policy; the fate of public health at local level under Indian control; and the effects of quarantine on colonial trade and the pilgrimage to Mecca. The book places medicine within the context of debates about the government of India, and relations between rulers and ruled. In emphasising the active role of the indigenous population, and in its range of material, it differs significantly from most other work conducted in this subject area.

Global health governance has been the subject of wide scholarship, more recently brought to the fore by priorities for global health defined by the Sustainable Development Agenda. The health landscape itself has changed dramatically in the last two decades, shaped by cross-border flows of capital, ideas, technology intermediated through the complex interaction between global, national and local actors and institutions. This book analyses the complex terrain of global health governance and local responses to new global forms of integration and fragmentation in India. It unpacks, both conceptually and empirically, local manifestation and translation of global health architecture and regimes and how these processes influence public health policy and practice; as well as to what extent rules and flows are complied with, resisted and transformed at national and sub-national levels. Drawing together critical scholarship on interactions between global and local actors, focusing on processes, dilemmas, conflicts and trade-offs that such engagement presents for national health policies and health systems, it speaks to this interface between the global, national and local. Filling an important gap in global health governance scholarship in India, the book is a useful contribution to the fields of Global Health Policy, International health and Development, Health Systems, Health Inequalities, public health, public administration, development studies, social work, nursing, management studies and mainstream social science disciplines that engage with globalisation and health.

Drawing from the work of academics and practitioners from ten states across the country, this edited volume showcases and synthesises the diversity and richness of efforts to understand and act on the social determinants of health in India, the conditions in which we are born, grow, live work and age. Such an effort is salient in the current era of Sustainable Development Goals (SDG), which have foregrounded the issue of equity and the need for a comprehensive, multi-sectoral agenda for health and development. In India, particularly in the last decade, there have been myriad efforts to more critically theorise and intervene in areas with bearing on health, like conflict, nutrition or urbanisation, or to address the concerns of vulnerable groups like women, children and the elderly. From these efforts emerge lessons of convergence for academic and policymaking institutions in India who are looking to operationalise and bring life to the SDG agenda in India and other Low and Middle Income Country settings. The book comprises eleven chapters and six short commentaries that appear in conversation with each other, as well as an annexure of validated, ready-to-use indicators for monitoring of social determinants of health.

World Health Statistics 2015 contains WHO's annual compilation of health-related data for its 194 Member States and includes a summary of the progress made towards achieving the health-related Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and associated targets. This year it also includes highlight summaries on the topics of reducing the gaps between the world's most-advantaged and least-advantaged countries and on current trends in official development assistance (ODA) for health. As in previous years World Health Statistics 2015 has been compiled using publications and databases produced and maintained by WHO technical programmes and regional offices. A number of demographic and socioeconomic statistics have also been derived from databases maintained by a range of other organizations.

This book describes the present awful state of India’s Public Health Care Delivery, its dismal planning and implementation. It argues that it can be remedied comprehensively and effectively, using its ‘own already present’ resources. A radical re-evaluation of some sacrosanct ideas and discarding many of these, especially in Primary Care and its structure is required. It can be done without disadvantage to the last man served. This book starts with the sea change India has undergone and emphasizes new ways of managing health. High quality work force creation and its deployment, an unsolved problem is effectively given a solution. The bulk of the book discusses the entire public health care structure and function and how it can be newly laid out with proper work force allocation, hitherto grossly inadequate, including professionals from other training backgrounds. It is total solution that will help India to achieve the goal of Universal Health Care.