Sylvia Karpagam ([email protected])

Dr. Sylvia Karpagam is a public health doctor (MD Community medicine/MBBS) with around 20 years of experience. She has worked on health and social determinants from a rights perspective with communities, networks as well as human rights organisations such as Amnesty India International, People Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL), People’s Health Movement (PHM), World Health Organisation etc. She has been involved in the Covid-19 related public health and relief work.

As part of the Right to health campaigns at the state and national level, she has conducted trainings, carried out research, and published articles. She has conducted mainly qualitative research on impact, particularly on vulnerable communities, of privatisation and commercialisation of healthcare and nutrition. She has published in peer reviewed journals about the impact of public private partnership and health insurance, as well as critiqued the lack of regulation in private healthcare.

As part of a larger campaign on the Right to nutrition, she has participated in fact-finding visits, trainings, advocacy challenging a centralised, corporate-driven school lunch scheme, denial of eggs and ideological impositions through government food schemes. She is on the expert committee of ALEPH2020 on nutrition and public health.

She has conducted training for healthcare personnel, students and community workers on health, nutrition and social determinants of health. She has been trained at National Institute of Nutrition Hyderabad on diet surveys and anthropometry. She has also been trained under the National Family Health Survey-4 for Clinical Anthropometric and Biological markers.

To stay updated with her clinical skills, she has worked at Anti-Retroviral Centres (ART) as a Medical Officer. This has also given her a good idea of practical issues and field level gaps in government health schemes and issues around accessibility, affordability, stigma etc.

During the Covid pandemic, she has been involved in health education, podcasts, articles, seminars, policy analysis etc as well as health consultations for Covid and non-Covid conditions. She has been part of a group that has submitted recommendations to the government on drug pricing control, discrimination, lockdown related impact on Covid and non-Covid patients. She has also published a report on the occupational hazards faced by people exposed to Covid related waste (hospital cleaners, mortuaries, burial sites, waste pickers, garbage disposal etc). She has brought out a booklet on the role of health workers in custodial torture.

She has developed training material for health workers including doctors on different public health issues and engages on social media on issues of caste, gender, nutrition and regulation of the private sector. Having worked with different aspects of social determinants of health she has a comprehensive understanding of public health with all its dimensions.

She blogs at Health and Social determinants.

Her Twitter id is sakie339 and Instagram is @sylviakarpagam.