Community healthcare should empower people against commodification: Expert

Bengaluru: Community health should give people and communities more control over healthcare and medicine so that they are not commodified, public health consultant and policy researcher Dr Ravi Narayan said.

Delivering the 10th Prof RL Kapur memorial oration at the National Institute of Advanced Studies of Indian Institute of Science on "Beyond Medicine: Towards a New Paradigm of Public Health-A Collective Journey", Narayan said the involvement of public leadership in community health is crucial to the transformation of health sciences, which has only been affordable to the privileged sections.

During the lecture, Narayan reminisced about his work in community medicine under the guidance and experience of Dr RL Kapur.

"Our responsibility today as practitioners of public health discourse is to ensure that people exercise collectively their right to their health and move away from the counterproductive western model of healthcare or the indigenous mode of healthcare to replace it by an alternative model that is community health," he said, adding that healthcare as a community practice is a political change involving transformation at the grassroot level.

He noted that RL Kapur is one of the pioneers in the public health movement in India, explaining his in-depth fieldwork and research to understand healthcare practices across the country stemming from their deep-rooted belief systems.

Narayan believes strengthening the public health system depends on comprehensive primary health care, ensuring equal access to good quality care, addressing health determinants, and reducing health disparities.