Event held jointly with MoHFW to commemorate World Health Day
At a national consultation held recently in New Delhi jointly with the Ministry of Health & Family Welfare (MoHFW), Government of India (GoI) to commemorate the World Health Day 2015, the WHO Country Office for India gave out awards for Public Health Champions.
The award winners were: SEWA Rural; Community Health Department, Christian Medical College, Vellore; Biocon Foundation and Dr Vinod K Paul, AIIMS, New Delhi for sustained contribution to public health. In the category of innovation, the awardees were Narayana Health and Ekjut.
Present on the occasion were: Bhanu Pratap Sharma, Secretary (Health & Family Welfare), GoI and Chairperson, Food Safety and Standards Association of India (FSSAI); Keshav Desiraju, Secretary, Department of Consumer Affairs, GoI; Dr Jagdish Prasad, Director General Health Services, MoHFW; Anshu Prakash, Joint Secretary, MoHFW; Sudhanshu Pandey, Joint Secretary, Ministry of Commerce; YS Malik, Chief Executive Officer, FSSAI, MoHFW; and Dr S Venkatesh, Director, National Centre of Disease Control (NCDC), MoHFW, amongst other eminent academic, technical, research and industry experts, non-governmental and civil society organisations.
Highlighting the importance of the public health champions awards, Dr Nata Menabde, WHO Representative to India said, “Public health is a challenging field and these awards are our way of saying thank you to the talented individuals and organisations that have dedicated themselves to this field. These awards are an attempt to recognise and honour the best in this field and also to encourage others to emulate them.”
The rationale for recognising public health champions is to honour efforts of both, individual(s) and institution(s) who have made an outstanding contribution to public health through advocacy for and involvement in impactful health policies and programmes with proven public health achievements and substantial improvement in equitable health outcomes in the country.
The awards comprise two categories: sustained contribution to the field of public health, and innovation. The scope of the awards covers contributions to significant advances in population and person focused services and inter-sectoral actions. In addition, contributions that have assisted WHO in performing any one of its six core functions were taken into consideration.
EP News Bureau – Mumbai