Collaborative approach: Tackling a public health challenge is a team effort

News: All major public health problems need combined technical, bureaucratic and political efforts. As the friction between the different wings affects the health policies in India.

What different wings involves in health profiling?

The three important branches, technical, politicians and administration need to work together for achieving better policy formulation and implementation.

Technical people have the benefit of training and expertise in specific areas. They regularly update and provide advice based on evidence. Policymakers or elected representatives choose the final set of points for making policy. Bureaucrats or the administration work through a hierarchical system to implement these interventions.

All are expected to work to maximize the public good without any personal agenda.

What are the contributions of various agents?

Technical groups like the National Technical Advisory Group on immunization provided acceptance and recommendations by policymakers for the allocation of sufficient resources. Bureaucracy worked by arranging logistics and ensuring supply through administration.

What are the challenges in this collaborative approach?

There are challenges of overstepping the boundaries. During the current pandemic, many scientists took positions on different pandemic responses, including lockdowns and school closures, which are beyond science.

What are the challenges posed by bureaucratization?

Here the process becomes more important than the end. The best example is when targets are fixed for everything, and they become the end in itself. Often such targets are politically driven. For example, data from sterilisation drives shows that fixing targets creates problems such as fake entries or non-entries.

How can the problem be resolved?

In general, the thinking is that science is right or has the right answers. Politicians and bureaucrats are often in the lower pecking order. But this thinking is not valid as Knowledge is useless if it is not applied for public benefit, and it is the politicians and administrators who enable this to happen. According to German physician Rudolf Virchow, medicine is a social science and politics is nothing else but medicine on a large scale.

Thus, there is a need to clear the boundaries between these three wings so that they don’t overstep each other. The problem of overstepping boundaries can further be minimised by aligning public health, administrative and political goals by mutual dialogue.

Source: This post is based on the article “Tackling a public health challenge is a team effort” published in Indian Express on 27th December 2021.