ABSTRACT
This volume has articles contributed by health researchers, practitioners, policy advocates, programme managers and a journalist, and poems by renowned poet–physician Gieve Patel. Each presents a distinctive view of a particular group of frontline health providers, based on field research or on the authors’ respective experiences of working with or as providers. The health providers addressed in this volume include doctors (working in the public and private sectors), nurses, public health workers, counsellors, traditional practitioners and homecare providers.
Different groups of health providers face struggles at diverse frontiers — social, professional and systemic. In the context of reforming health systems, government health workers must constantly negotiate the vagaries of changing working environments and policy vacillations. For traditional and homecare providers, formal health systems and structures often only reject and exclude their contributions. Medical doctors, conversely, face difficult challenges of introspection, as they tread the line between personal gain and public service.
The ideas and themes that emerge in this collection not only contribute to the understanding of providers’ roles as actors in the health systems and societies of contemporary India, but re-examines preconceptions about this critical occupational group. This volume advances the case for a deeper appreciation of India’s complex landscape of healthcare provision, and of the potential roles of frontline health providers as central figures in development.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
part I|65 pages
Government Health Workers: Uneasy At The Bottom
chapter 2|19 pages
The Midwifery Role of the Auxiliary Nurse Midwife
part II|79 pages
Doctors: Vexed Relationships With The Public Good
chapter 4|16 pages
Public Sector Doctors in an Era of Commercialisation
chapter 5|22 pages
Working with Private Practitioners on a Public Health Intervention
chapter 6|23 pages
Understanding Practitioners' Responses to National Policy Guidelines
chapter 7|16 pages
The Dynamics of Medicos' Anti-Reservation Protests of 2006
part III|62 pages
Traditional And Home Care Providers: The Edge Of Legitimacy
chapter 8|21 pages
The Community Role of Indigenous Healers
chapter 9|18 pages
Traditional Orthopaedic Practitioners' Place in Contemporary Health
chapter 10|21 pages
The Critical Role of Family Care Providers in HIV/AIDS
part IV|38 pages
Adapting, Transforming: Personal Experience In Professional Spaces