Meena’s PhD defense
Note from Dec 18, 2023 about my 2nd PhD student who dfended her PhD at Maastrict University supported by IPH Bengaluru
Tomorrow, Meena Putturaj, one of my 1st PhD students will defend her PhD at Maastricht University (@CAPHRI_UM) on patient (health) rights in Karnataka; her PhD is part of core health policy & systems research work @iphindia;
A thread on her prolific outputs from her PhD (1/n):
Our earliest collaboration began when we both sought to examine the need to increase autonomy & participation of nurses in health policy & systems; something that continues to be doctor-dominated; we wrote a commentary on this in @IndJMedEthics (2/n)
🔗: https://ijme.in/articles/enhancing-the-autonomy-of-indian-nurses/
Meena trained as a community health nurse & did her MPH at @ITMantwerp; for her masters dissertation she was already interested in health governance; she studied private health sector regulation in Karnataka in the context of KPMEA;👇🏽(3/n)
https://www.nmji.in/content/141/2021/34/2/Images/NatlMedJIndia_2021_34_2_100_326754.pdf
Continuing her interest in health governance, she wrote up a very interesting PhD proposal to study patient (health) rights in healthcare facilities in Karnataka, for which she was awarded the highly competitive DGD scholarship at @ITMantwerp; (4/n) https://iphindia.org/dr-meena-putturaj-phd-scholar/
Her PhD began with systematic (scoping) review:
“how do the multilevel actors, institutional structures, processes interact & influence patient rights implementation in healthcare facilities? How do they work at what level & in which contexts?” (5/n)
🔗 https://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/10/10/e038927.abstract
Based on this, she produced “an analytical framework on grievance redressal for patient rights violations in health facilities”; she “used lawsuits on patient rights violations from Indian Supreme Court to analyse relevance to Indian context” (6/n)
🔗: https://academic.oup.com/heapol/article-abstract/36/9/1470/6300626
Some of the key results from her work were already pointing towards health governance aspects that she would deepen in her upcoming empirical case studies (7/n)
Read her key results here from same paper above in @HPP_LSHTM 👇🏽
Next, she examined a particularly critical case of patient rights violations to “explore the power dynamics involved in resolving grievances raised by healthcare-seeking individuals” leading to this landmark paper in @GlobalHealthBMJ (8/n)
🔗: https://gh.bmj.com/content/7/5/e008626.abstract
Among other things, she explored the governmentally of grievance redressal 👉🏽 “ The State bureaucracy enacted its power by creating a maze of organisational units and by fragmenting the grievance redressal across various bureaucratic units”; (9/n)
She then sought to examine how health workers understand & practice patient rights in everyday context in 10 health facilities in Karnataka (& how it is understood in state policy documents) & the title of resulting article is rather telling 👇🏽(10/n)
🔗 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s12939-023-01850-5
With these above pieces of scholarship as the basis, she has produced a robust dissertation on realising patient rights in our settings which led to:👇🏽(11/n)
Her thesis propositions @maasuniversity 🔗: https://cris.maastrichtuniversity.nl/ws/portalfiles/portal/161639419/p8082.pdf
What’s next for her? We @iphindia were so delighted to hear that she’s been awarded a DBT/Wellcome Trust @India_Alliance Early Career Fellowship in public health to study health governance among Adivasi collectives as her work moves ahead in patient rights (12/n)
And for us @iphindia, yet another joyful occasion as we celebrate one of our colleagues’ achievements in hope that she/we continue “paying it forward”; this is as much a milestone for me as her! (13/n)
https://www.itg.be/en/health-stories/articles/paying-it-forward
If you survived this thread till here, please do watch her dissertation live to be streamed at link below at 1430 Indian time on 19 December 2023 (n/n)
🔗: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HU5C2pCOdx8
Original post: https://x.com/prashanthns/status/1736701451576266797
Last updated: 2026-10-04 06:59