Join us next Friday, December 11, for the launch event of the Lancet Citizens’ Commission on Reimagining India’s Health System.
The Lancet Citizens’ Commission is an ambitious, cross-sectoral endeavor that is working to develop a citizens’ roadmap to achieve universal health coverage throughout India. The Commission will be the first participatory, country-wide report of its scale to be published by the Lancet, a leading international medical journal that has paved the way for medical reforms and global health discussions around the world.
The launch event will formally announce the Lancet Citizens’ Commission to the public, and will consist of a panel discussion among three leading voices in healthcare, including; K. Vijay Raghavan, Principal Scientific Advisor of the Government of India; Soumya Swaminathan, Chief Scientist at the World Health Organization (WHO); and V.K. Paul, Member of NITI Aayog.
The event will be opened by Pamela Das, Senior Executive Editor of the Lancet, and will include remarks from the four co-chairs of the Commission: Tarun Khanna, Director of the Lakshmi Mittal and Family South Asia Institute, Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw, Executive Chairperson of Biocon Ltd; Vikram Patel, Professor of Global Health at Harvard Medical School; and Gagandeep Kang, Professor at Christian Medical College in Vellore. The co-chairs will be joined by a diverse panel of Commissioners, who have been brought together from government, academia, the scientific community, civil society, and private healthcare to spearhead this effort.
A key component of the event will include interactions between the speakers and the public on a range of issues regarding the Commission and the path to universal health coverage in India. This reflects a key guiding principle of this Commission: that structural change toward universal health coverage can only be attained through consultative and participatory engagement with the diverse sectors involved in healthcare and, most importantly, with India’s citizenry.
Over the next 12–24 months, the Commission will seek to go beyond the traditional boundaries of expertise to actively engage with stakeholders whose voices have rarely been heard in previous reports: those who deliver healthcare and those who receive it. The Citizens’ Commission is an unprecedented attempt to gather insights from across India through grassroots surveys, public consultations, and online discussions on the issue of universal health coverage. We hope that you will join us for its launch.
Join the launch event via YouTube Live on Friday, December 11.
YouTube Live link: https://bit.ly/rihslaunch
6:30–7:30 AM ET // 5:00–6:00 PM IST
For more information on this event, visit: https://bit.ly/rihslaunchevent