Lessons from our journey in clinical medicine and public health in India

McGill Global Health Programs is pleased to partner with the McGill International TB Centre to present this special hybrid seminar with Madhavi and Anurag Bhargava from the Yenepoya Medical College in Mangalore, India. Free pizza and samosas will be available for in-person attendees!

Program

We will cover our journey in clinical medicine and public health in India, across the areas of service provision, research, and advocacy in the presentation. This will include the transformative experience of co-founding a rural health programme and a low-cost rural hospital in a backward district in India. Our research agenda emerged from the felt-needs of patients and communities and shaped our observational and interventional research in tuberculosis, nutrition and acute infectious diseases, and have resulted in policy developments at the national level. Our advocacy has been in the areas of access to affordable medicines, comprehensive patient-centred care in TB, and the critical role of nutrition across the life span. We will summarize the lessons, both the learnings and the un-learnings, of this journey.

Speaker bios

Madhavi Bhargava is currently an Associate Professor in the department of Community Medicine at the Yenepoya Medical College in Mangalore, and associated with the Center of Nutrition Studies, at Yenepoya University. Madhavi worked initially as a primary care physician and surgeon in rural central India for 10 years, and later trained in public health and research. She is passionate about teaching under-graduate and post graduate students. She has been involved in the large RATIONS trial of nutritional support to reduce TB incidence in India.

Anurag Bhargava is currently a Professor in the department of Internal Medicine at Yenepoya Medical College, Mangalore and also associated with the Center for Nutrition Studies, Yenepoya University. He has worked on the interface of clinical medicine and public health in diverse settings across India, including as a rural physician for 10 years. He serves on advisory committees for organisations like the National TB Elimination Programme, WHO SEAR, WHO Geneva. He too has been involved in the RATIONS trial for the past 3 years.