Collaborators

Anveshi Research Centre for Women's Studies is an organisation committed to contemporary research, critical reflection and activism. Drawing on feminist theory and intervention, we explore contemporary issues in education, Dalits and minorities, health and healthcare systems, development studies, law and critical legal studies, and the public domain. Anveshi works at an interdisciplinary location drawing scholars and activists from many fields. The Centre is located in Hyderabad, India.

Since its inception, Anveshi's work has reflected an abiding commitment to the problems related to women's health and well-being. Starting in 2005, it has systematically invested time and effort to research and reflection on the problem of health in India. It has provided the Convening Team for the Medico Friend Circle during the period 2014-16.

Anveshi's publications include: Savaalaksha Sandehaalu: Streelu-Arogyasamasyalu (One Hundred Thousand Doubts: Women's Health Issues), 2006 and 1991; Taking Charge of our Bodies: A Health Handbook for Women, 2004; and Towards a Critical Medical Practice: Reflections on the Dilemmas of Medical Culture Today, 2010.

For more information, please visit www.anveshi.org.in/

Dr Reena Sharma

CanSupport is a group of palliative care experts committed to enabling a caring and supportive society around cancer management. It grew out of the personal experience of Mrs Harmala Gupta, a survivor of Hodgkin's lymphoma. It was registered as Society in 1996.

The focus of CanSupport is on providing free palliative and supportive care services to cancer patients and their families in the National Capital Region. Its wide-ranging programmes fill a critical gap in the care of cancer patients and are designed to help patients of all ages and cancers throughout their cancer journey, right from the day of diagnosis, across all curative therapies and as a continuum of care adapting to the unique needs in case the cancer progresses into its terminal phase. The support extends even after the death of the patient through bereavement and rehabilitative support to the families.

Dr Reena Sharma, will represent CanSupport at 6^th NBC.

For more info visit: www.cansupport.org/

Centre for Enquiry into Health and Allied Themes (CEHAT) is the research centre of the Anusandhan Trust. It comprises a multidisciplinary team of doctors, lawyers, social workers, public health experts and counsellors and is engaged in research, intervention, education and advocacy in the field of health.

CEHAT conducts socially relevant and rigorous academic health research and health action for the wellbeing of disadvantaged groups, to strengthen people's health movements and for realizing the right to health and healthcare. It acts as an interface between progressive people's movements and academia.

The key areas of CEHAT's work include health systems and policy research, budget advocacy and research, gender and health, access to abortion, and violence against women.

All work at CEHAT endeavours to create space for the participation of people without compromising on academic rigour. CEHAT's ethical guidelines for research are structured around informed consent, confidentiality and relaying information back to the relevant segments of society.

For more information visit us at www.cehat.org, www.gme-cehat.org and www.patientsrights.in

CEHAT will be represented by Ms Sanjida Arora in NBC-6.

Ms Sanjida Arora

Dr Vina Vaswani

Centre of Ethics, Yenepoya University, Mangaluru, Karnataka

The Centre for Ethics was established in 2011, with the objective of bringing about a reawakening of medical ethics and bioethics in the healthcare setting, through academic programmes, research, and cultural exchanges.Yenepoya University's Ethics Committee (housed in the Centre) has FERCAP accreditation.'Encircle' is an Ethics Club that allows students and faculty to interact informally.

The Centre of Ethics offers a Postgraduate Diploma in Bioethics & Medical Ethics, a Postgraduate Diploma in Clinical Ethics, an Ethics internship in Physiotherapy, an Intensive Summer Workshop in Ethics and Research, and an Elective in Environmental Ethics. The Centre has been awarded an NIH grant to start a Master's program in Research Ethics from 2017.

Dr Vina Vaswani will represent the Centre of Ethics of Yenepoya University in NBC-6.

Website: http://yenepoya.edu.in/colleges.php?id=41&org=center/

Centre for Health and Social Justice (CHSJ) is a national civil society resource organization working on policy issues related to social justice, governance and accountability, primarily in the domains of health justice and gender justice. It is registered as a Charitable Trust with its headquarters in New Delhi and field interventions in 10 Indian states. CHSJ uses networking, capacity building, research and evidence-based advocacy as primary strategies, and seeks to strengthen governance and accountability in public health and gender justice through technical support, research, and policy advocacy. The predominant themes of its intervention are community action for health rights, reproductive and sexual health rights, masculinities and gender.

CHSJ is represented by Ms Surekha Dhaleta in NBC-6.

To learn more about CHSJ, visit: http://www.chsj.org/

Cipla Palliative Care & Training Centre has been functioning since 1997, providing palliative care for cancer patients. The goal is to provide pain and symptom relief and through holistic approach during and after treatment. CPCTC tries to improve the quality of life through a combination of medicine, music and yoga.

CPTCT's model involves the family in providing palliative care on inpatient, outpatient and home care basis, where the family is trained to look after the patient. The centre extends their services beyond death by supporting the family during bereavement period. The centre promotes palliation, through research, training and outreach activities. All their services are free of cost.

Disclaimer: CPCTC does not provide any treatment to cure cancer.

Cipla Palliative Care and Training Centre (http://www.carebeyondcure.org/) will be represented by Dr Ravindra B Ghooi on 6^th NBC.

Dr Ravindra B Ghooi

Dr Shivakumar S Iyer

The department of Critical Care Medicine, Bharati Vidyapeeth University Medical College, Pune, was created in 2013 to streamline the working of the ICU's at Bharati Hospital & Research Centre and create an academic environment for research and education. The department is well equipped and provides critical care services for around 3000 critically ill patients every year. The medical emergency and code blue team from the ICU provides outreach services for critically ill patients in other parts of the hospital. The department of CCM also monitors several quality indicators and conduct audits to provide quality health care for ICU patients. A number of training programs are conducted on an ongoing basis for undergraduates, postgraduates, faculty and nurses. Bharati Vidyapeeth also runs the post doctoral ISCCM courses since 2012. They have applied for recognition to the MCI for running the DM critical care course.

For more info: http://mcpune.bharatividyapeeth.edu/SiteData/pdf/Medical/CriticalCare.pdf

Dr Shivakumar S Iyer, Prof & Head of Department, will represent Department of Critical Care, Bharati Vidyapeeth, Pune on 6^th NBC.

HALO Medical Foundation (HMF), Usmanabad, Maharashtra was formed in 1980 by Dr Shashikant Ahankari as a forum for medical students and practitioners. Students debate subjects they feel need to be addressed urgently, such as ethics in medicine, reforms in medical education, the doctor-patient relationship and the cost of treatment. HMF was started as a group activity driven by the shared vision of 'Taking health services to the most impoverished and needy' and continues to work closely with medical students, taking up activities like health education, diagnostic camps and blood donation drives in the villages around the medical college at Aurangabad.

HMF tackles the health of the rural poor with a gender and rights based approach, empowering women. People should expect good healthcare services and make their voices heard if they don't get them. It is every woman's right to deliver her child in safety, to be able to provide that child with the immunisations and nutrition necessary for its development, and to have the knowledge and facilities to take care of her own health properly.

The organisation's foundation is its Bharat Vaidya programme which trains women from the community as health workers. HMF believes that it is possible to treat over three-quarters of prevalent diseases in the village itself through a trained health worker, making good quality, basic healthcare available to the rural poor at low cost, and has trained over 350 women as 'Bharat Vaidya', community health workers.

Dr Shashikant Ahankari will represent HMF in the 6^th NBC.

For more info visit: http://www.halomedicalfoundation.org/

Dr Shashikant Ahankari

Prof Dr S Stephen Jayard

Jnana-Deepa Vidyapeeth (JDV), a pontifical institute of Philosophy & Religion, has a history going back to 1893, when Pope Leo XIII founded the Papal Seminary in Kandy, Sri Lanka. In 1955 it was shifted to Pune, India, and in 1972 the academic part of the Seminary granting degrees in Philosophy and Theology, adopted the Indian name Jnana-Deepa Vidyapeeth. To foster authentic moral values and human rights, JDV promotes dialogue among religions, cultures, communities and movements. JDV's distinguishing hallmarks include quest for meaning, reverential attitude towards Nature, and commitment to human dignity regardless of gender, caste, creed and ethnicity. Prof Dr S Stephen Jayard will represent JDV in 6^th NBC.

For more info, please visit: www.jdv.edu.in/

MOHAN (Multi Organ Harvesting Aid Network) Foundation is a registered Charitable Trust, based in Chennai that has been working towards augmenting deceased organ donation in India since 1997. It also has offices in Hyderabad, Delhi-NCR, Mumbai, Jaipur, Chandigarh and Nagpur. Its objectives are -

• Increasing public awareness about deceased organ donation
• Counseling families of "brain dead" patients to donate their loved one's organs
• Capacity building - training Transplant Coordinators, ICU consultants and staff
• Liaising with State and Central government in facilitating organ donations
• Creating a transparent system for organ sharing and allocation by creating registries
• Providing support to organ failure patients and deceased donor families

MOHAN Foundation (www.mohanfoundation.org/) will be represented by Dr Sunil Shroff on 6^th NBC.

Dr Sunil Shroff

Dr Deepesh Reddy Vendoti

Observer Research Foundation (ORF) Mumbai (www.orfonline.org/)

ORF is a multidisciplinary public policy think tank started in New Delhi in 1990 by the widely respected late Shri R. K. Mishra, who envisaged it to be a broad-based intellectual platform for nation-building. Beginning 2010, ORF in Mumbai has been lead by Shri Sudheendra Kulkarni, a social activist and public intellectual who worked as an aide to former Prime Minister Shri Atal Behari Vajpayee in the PMO.

Public Health is one of the focus areas for ORF, which seeks to impact policy and decision making at all levels of governance by bridging the gaps in perception and communication between policy makers on one hand and the people with expertise, ideas and championship along with general public on the other. Its efforts are aimed at enhancing health status of people in Mumbai and beyond, through strengthened and efficient health systems, effective public-private-people partnership mechanisms to ensure equity, quality and rationality in delivery of health care by various stakeholders. ORF wll be represented by Dr Deepesh Reddy Vendoti.

Simpatico Palliative Connect provides consultative palliative care services to patients who are suffering from life limiting illness and their family members. These include medical management for the pain and other distressing symptoms and psycho-social management which involves counseling and support to patient and family members who are living with the illness for a long period of time. The aim is to improve the quality of life of both by making providing comfort and addressing the issues that they face while coping with the illness.

Our other services

• Training and education for health professionals as well as caregivers, volunteers
• Awareness building for different sections of the society
• Consultancy for setting up palliative care services for hospitals, health institutions, NGOs

Dr Priyadarshini Kulkarni will represent Simpatico Palliative Connect on 6^th NBC. For more info about the organization, please visit: www.simpaticopalliative.org/

Dr Priyadarshini Kulkarni

Dr Geeta Vemuganti

University of Hyderabad and the Institutional Ethics Committee: The University of Hyderabad (UoH), is a premier central University of higher education and research in the country.

The University is rated as a High Output-High Impact category among the top 50 institutions in India with publications in citation- Index Journals by NISSAT (National Information System for Science and Technology) and recently awarded the Best Central University in the country In view of its expanding research, University of Hyderabad constituted its first Ethics Committee in December 2002. Subsequently in 2014, the Institutional Ethics Committee (IEC) was reconstituted and the responsibility of the IEC functioning was moved under the School of Medical Sciences, under the Chairmanship of Sri Justice T N C Rangarajan. The IEC, UoH has constituted its standard operating procedures as per the DCGI regulatory requirement to provide guidelines to researchers and also as a reference document for members of the IEC. University also hosted the 4^th National Bioethics meeting in 2012 keeping up with the spirit of disseminating knowledge and good practices in the area of bioethics.

Website: www.uohyd.ac.in/

Dr Geeta Vemuganti will represent UoH IEC on 6^th NBC

YRGCARE: The YR Gaitonde Medical, Educational and Research Foundation (1993), an internationally recognized non-profit in Chennai founded by Dr Suniti Solomon, who first documented evidence of HIV (India, 1986) has pioneered HIV prevention, care and research through YRG Center for AIDS Research and Education (YRGCARE) and ECO Kitchen which carefully crafts production, minimizes environmental impact and helps improve lives of underserved families.

YRGCARE, a premier HIV care, training and multi-site research center, provides clinical, psychosocial care and state-of-the-art laboratory facilities at low costs for people living with HIV and those at risk. Services: HIV, sexuality, treatment education, workplace interventions, voluntary counseling and testing, affordable continuum of care, matrimonial services, OBGYN services-HIV affected couples, pediatric care, complementing community outreach-advocacy-under-privileged urban communities, MSM and IDUs and therapeutic recreation for children with serious illnesses. Dr S. Swarnalakshmi will represent YRG CARE on 6^th NBC.

For more info, please visit: www.yrgcare.org/

Dr S. Swarnalakshmi

Information about the following collaborating organisations will be added soon.

• Sri Chitra Tirunal Insitute of Medical Sciences and Technology, Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala https://www.sctimst.ac.in/
• St John's Medical College and Hospital, Bengaluru, Karnataka www.stjohns.in/
• FIAMC Biomedical Ethics Center, Mumbai, Maharashtra www.fiamc.org
• Sama Women's Health, New Delhi www.samawomenshealth.org
• Zonal Transplant Coordination Center (ZTCC), Pune, Maharashtra www.ztccpune.com
• Network for Promotion of Ethics in Medicine, Kolkata, West Bengal
• Vidhayak Trust, Pune Maharashtra