Pragati Hebbar

• Doctor of Public Health
• Faculty Member at Institute of Public Health

This review aims to describe and synthesise the implementation strategies from the available literature on integrating oral health into schools of Low- and Middle-Income countries.

There is a growing interest in studying and unpacking implementation of policies and programmes as it provides an opportunity to reduce the policy translation time lag taken for research findings to translate to policies and get implemented and understand why policies may fail. Realist evaluation is a theory-driven approach that embraces complexity...

Background A robust Health Technology Assessment (HTA) framework is crucial to address the rising burden of healthcare costs and to inform decision-making to promote high-quality health systems. This research aims to describe the HTA methods and mechanisms for the successful implementation of HTA in the WHO South-East Asia region, and contextualize...

Background Maternal mortality remains a persistent public health concern despite significant strides in reduction over the past few decades, with a global maternal mortality ratio (MMR) of 223 deaths per 100,000 live births in 2020, indicating a 34.3% decline over 20 years, with Low income countries (LICs) and Lower Middle-Income Countries (LMICs)...

Background Tobacco use and the associated health burden is a cause of concern in India and globally. Despite several tobacco control policies in place, their sub-optimal and variable implementation across Indian states has remained a concern. Studies evaluating the real-world implementation of policies such as Cigarettes and Other Tobacco Products...

Background : A robust Health Technology Assessment (HTA) mechanism is crucial to address the rising burden of healthcare costs and expenditures of patients. This research aims to describe the HTA methods and mechanisms for successful implementation of HTA in the WHO South-East Asia region, and contextualize the synthesized evidence relevant to Indi...

India has made significant progress in tobacco control in the past decade, leading to a decrease in overall consumption. However, tobacco-related illnesses and deaths continue to affect Indians disproportionately across different states due to various factors. These include socioeconomic, cultural, commercial, political, and regional disparities th...

Realist evaluation is in essence a theory-building and testing approach. We argue that in practice, the theory-building potential of realist evaluation, review and research is not fully exploited in the field of global health. Our assumption is that the Structure-Agency-Culture explanatory framework of critical realist Margaret Archer could stimula...

Tobacco use is a risk factor to major non-communicable diseases and is a leading cause of death and disability. In India, 1.3 million adults die each year due to tobacco consumption. Since tobacco-related health disparities are complex and varied, multi-sectoral action (MSA) is crucial to support the implementation of tobacco control laws—the Cigar...

Tobacco use is a risk factor to major non-communicable diseases and is a leading cause of death and disability. In India, 1.3 million adults die each year due to tobacco consumption. Since tobacco-related health disparities are complex and varied, multi-sectoral action (MSA) is crucial to support the implementation of tobacco control laws—the Cigar...

The transition from the COVID-19 pandemic offers a strategic opportunity to build back better and use the disruption to transform health systems. This Policy Brief calls on the G20 to take the lead in health systems transformation. Health systems need to reorient to primary health care to address fragmentation and deliver health services in a compr...

Smokeless tobacco (SLT) products like gutka and paan masala are a growing public health crisis in India. Despite enacting a ban—the highest form of regulation—little is known about implementation progress. The purpose of this study was to look at how enforcement of gutka ban is covered in Indian news media and if media is a reliable source of data....

Tobacco control is complex and multidimensional. In India, 266.8 million adults use tobacco in some form, with local contextual factors shaping its consumption, production, and trade. Actors have a stake in tobacco represent different sectors; with varying priorities, responding to different ideas, and exerting varying levels of influence often mak...

Tobacco use is a risk factor to major non-communicable diseases and is a leading cause of death and disability. In India, 1.3 million adults die each year due to tobacco consumption. Since tobacco-related health disparities are complex and varied, multi-sectoral action (MSA) is crucial to support the implementation of tobacco control laws—the Cigar...

The burden of tobacco use is disproportionately high in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). There is scarce theorisation on what works with respect to implementation of tobacco control policies in these settings. Given the complex nature of tobacco control policy implementation, diversity in outcomes of widely implemented policies and the def...

Background: Studies show that targeted media interventions aimed at raising awareness about tobacco-related health hazards are effective in controlling and preventing tobacco use in low/low- and middle-income countries. However, media reporting on multi-sectoral action (MSA) as an effective tobacco control strategy is limited. In India, where the d...

Background: There has been a growing interest around implementation and unpacking the ‘black-box’ of how things work over the last few years. Policies are complex in their design and implementation because of the number of interacting agents, the environment and forces that influence in a given system. There is a dearth of research informing policy...

Background: Tobacco use is a major public health challenge in India with over 267 million consumers. Various initiatives have been used to control and reduce tobacco usage but few of them are studied in detail. One of them is the National Tobacco Control Programme (NTCP) that ensures the enforcement and implementation of tobacco control laws/measur...

Introduction: The youth are a vulnerable population-group for tobacco-related harms. Schools are an excellent setting for health promotion; yet there is a dearth of school-based cessation interventions, rarely evaluated for their impact. Here, we assess the impact of the LifeFirst program: an ongoing tobacco and supari (areca nut) cessation interv...

Introduction: There are ongoing policies and programs to reduce tobacco use and minimise the associated health burden in India. However, there are several challenges in practice leading to different outcomes across Indian states. Inadequate understanding of how national tobacco control policies achieve their results under varied circumstances obstr...

Poster presented at the Sixth Global Symposium on Health Systems Research (HSR2020) based on our ongoing DBT/ Wellcome Trust India Alliance early career fellowship project awarded to Dr. Pragati Hebbar

In India, the Covid-19 pandemic has thrown open challenges on multiple fronts: (a) the reconfiguration of care in hospitals, in response to Covid-19, has led to many patients suffering non-Covid conditions having to delay their treatment, and (b) the lockdown which though necessary has affected people unequally, some being much worse-off than other...

Incidences of COVID-19 cases in India was, until recently, was estimated to be restricted to people in cities with a history of travel or exposure to someone else with travel to one of the COVID-19 reporting countries. As of now however, the rate at which official figures are rising, and some case histories seem to strongly indicate that community...

The National Health Policy in India mentions equity as a key policy principle and emphasises the role of affirmative action in achieving health equity for a range of excluded groups. We conducted a scoping review of literature and three multi-stakeholder workshops to better understand the available evidence on the impact of affirmative action polic...

Background and Objectives: Oral submucous fibrosis (OSMF) is a potentially malignant lesion of the oral cavity and successful management remains a challenge. Our study aims to compare the efficacy of three commonly used modalities of treatment, namely (i) non-invasive therapy like physiotherapy only, (ii) physiotherapy in combination with antioxida...

Background: Tobacco use accounts for eight to nine lakh adult deaths annually in India. India enacted a national legislation “Cigarettes and Other Tobacco Products Act, 2003” (COTPA) to protect health of non-smokers and reduce tobacco consumption. However, even a decade after enacting this law, its implementation remains suboptimal and variable acr...

http://www.hhrjournal.org/2014/07/15/litigation-for-claiming-health-rights-insights-from-tobacco-control/

Oral submucous fibrosis (OSMF) a condition first described in the 1950s in the modern literature still remains elusive of a cure. For many years this condition had been confined to countries like India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, etc., but now this condition is being reported from Western countries as well. Inspite of intensive research over the years i...

Oral lichen planus is a difficult condition to treat because of its chronic nature. Various treatment modalities have resulted in partial regression of symptoms but not a complete cure. Aloe vera, a product with minimal adverse effects, can be tried to treat this disorder. A 38-year-old male patient diagnosed with lichen planus of the skin and the...

The present study aimed to assess the presence and level of colonization of Candida in patients with oral mucosal lesions, to determine the presence or absence of candidal hyphae in biopsy specimens and to correlate the degree of epithelial dysplasia with the number of colony-forming units of Candida. We performed a prospective study including 50 p...

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The incidence of oral premalignant and malignant lesions is on the rise due to an increased number of people taking in tobacco and alcohol related habits. 1028 patients with tobacco, alcohol and areca nut habits attending our Department of Oral Medicine and Radiology formed the study sample. An interviewer based questionnaire was used to record the...

COVID-19 Preparedness Checklist for Urban Primary Health Centres in India PURPOSE OF THIS DOCUMENT Incidences of COVID-19 cases in India was, until recently, was estimated to be restricted to people in cities with a history of travel or exposure to someone else with travel to one of the COVID-19 reporting countries. As of now however, the rate at...