Health Awareness and Health Policy: Health education and awareness is an important sub-set of science communication. PSF plays an important role in developing education and awareness material to support its objectives and engaged is policy advocacy for change.

Objectives

Health education, strengthening primary healthcare as part of achieving health for all and realisation of right to health and healthcare as a fundamental right.

Activities

Historically there are two major contributions of PSF that must be noted.

The current engagement of PSF is on four areas:

  1. Advocacy and evidence building to support adoption and realisation of right to health and healthcare.
  2. Creating awareness in the public of preventive and promotive measures required as appropriate to each age group, and the services they should expect and receive as an entitlement in the network of public health facilities.
  3. Actions to protect the public from the rising and impoverishing costs of health care. This includes both ensuring free or highly subsidized care by public providers having enough capacity and effective health insurance coverage where referral to private sector becomes necessary.
  4. Actions on the social determinants of health- which includes the “ Healthy City; Health Village” Initiative and strengthening public health laws.

Note on Past contributions of PSF in health domain.

First is the contribution to the development of the health activists role in public health services.. From the very onset of PSF and it also played an important role in the literacy programme. Subsequently learning from the literacy campaigns there were many efforts at developing a community health approach of this the most important was the DST project (1997-99): “Building an effective, sustainable health activists source using appropriate S&T inputs and programme design.”  This was to lead later to two UNICEF programmes based on health activists ( 1999- 2004) , and still later it formed the technical basis or pilot on which the Mitanin programme of Chhattisgarh (2002 to present) was based, and this in turn led into the National Health Mission.

Another major contribution was the PSF role in initiating the peoples health movement in India. PSF provided  the seed funding and support to organize the visits of Dr Sundararaman to visit the different states and organize the first workshops that led to the massive mobilization leading to the first National Health Assembly in December 2000. This led to the creation of the peoples health movement. The peoples health movement has remained active ever since, though never in the lead role

PSF has also undertaken community based work in rural sanitation, in reduction of indoor pollution and in nutrition. More recently it led a major study on the covid pandemic which was used to inform and improve policy response and government strategy.