KPHA 2023 should explicitly include state accountability: Response to Fernandez et al.

The commentary "Public health ethics and the Kerala Public Health Act, 2023" published on January 27, 2024 in the Indian Journal of Medical Ethics (IJME) has received a response from members of the State Health Systems Resource Centre and Government Medical College, Malappuram, Kerala. They explain that the Kerala Public Health Act (KPHA) is a legal document and not required to explicitly include accountability mechanisms and social obligations of the state. Given the very real danger of state over-reach as was evident during the Covid pandemic, these checks and balances should, in fact, be non-negotiable.

COMMENTARY: Public health ethics and the Kerala Public Health Act, 2023.

This commentary looks at the Kerala Public Health Act (KPHA), passed on November 28, 2023, through the lens of public health ethics. While the Act recognises the importance of prevention and strengthening of social systems, it falters in the public health ethics and human rights framework, ignoring international public health principles such as the Siracusa Principles and guidelines for individual diseases such as tuberculosis. The Covid-19 pandemic in India itself offers ample learnings, which have been disregarded, on the need for caution against state overreach.

Joint study led by International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) puts meat-eating women's lives at risk.

The findings of a collaborative study in Uttar Pradesh, India, by the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), Family Health International (FHI) and Johns Hopkins (JH), and funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF), have been tweeted out from the IFPRI Twitter handle (See: https://twitter.com/POSHANsm/status/1268074050468712449) on June 4, 2020, along with a graph, stating.

Caste-washing the healthcare system will do little to address its discriminatory practices.

Bullying, discrimination and harassment within the healthcare system in India is well known and urgent measures have to be put in place to address them. However locating caste-based harassment as general bullying would be a disservice to the thousands of young people from vulnerable communities who often face extreme harassment within the system. Naming this as caste based harassment would be the first step to addressing it.

Predicting appointment misses in hospitals using data analytics.

Background: There is growing attention over the last few years about non-attendance in hospitals and its clinical and economic consequences. There have been several studies documenting the various aspects of non-attendance in hospitals. Project Predicting Appoint Misses (PAM) was started with the intention of being able to predict the type of patients that would not come for appointments after making bookings.