FIU professor champions women’s health in rural India


Update: This story from the fall of 2012 details a successful program, founded and run by FIU professor Purnima Madhivanan, that provides health care to needy women and children in rural India. The program has now been profiled in a video that was submitted for competition. The video that receives the greatest number of popular votes will be awarded a $10,000 prize, which Madhivanan hopes to win to expand her work. To view and vote for the video – called “Saving Children, Improving Lives” – by the May 15 deadline, click here.

Purnima Madhivanan got booted out of three hospitals in the village of Mysore, India, because the free health care she offered poor patients hurt the hospitals’ bottom lines.

Purnima Madhivanan

Trained in medicine in India and at the time continuing her education in the United States, Madhivanan had returned to her homeland in 2006 to complete dissertation research for a Ph.D. in public health.

Madhivanan had to quickly find a way to continue what she had started: screening and treating women for sexually transmitted infections. So she opened her own clinic and hired village women who had never worked before to reach out directly to the community.

“I had one year to finish my dissertation, so I had to make a choice. I had the medical license, so I set up shop, bought tables, chairs, curtains, everything,” says Madhivanan, who today is a professor of epidemiology in FIU’s Stempel College of Public Health and Social Work.

Once her study ended, Madhivanan had a hard time closing the place. She recognized the tremendous need in India and understood firsthand the societal challenges women there face.

“The choice I had to make was do I shut down this clinic that I had started which is embraced by the community or keep it going. It was a very clear decision. We sold our house…we sold our car, everything, and just put all the money into making sure the clinic was running.”

Today the clinic employs 27 local women as health educators and clinicians under the auspices of the independent Public Health Research Institute in India, which Madhivanan founded and directs from Miami. The institute comprises a reproductive health clinic, two mobile clinics, a lab and a research facility. It provides tests and exams to thousands of women and girls annually. Screening for HIV and for cervical cancer – the No. 1 killer of females in India – is among the services offered. Students from the United States, including those at FIU, have spent time working for the institute as part of their graduate studies and have assisted in site-based clinical trials on which Mahivanan is principal investigator, including an NIH-funded study completed in 2011.

“We do research related to public health, issues related to women and children, and we do service,” Madhivanan says. “The impact has been tremendous.”

Madhivanan has relied on creative measures to overcome the difficulties of catering to low-income women in a male-dominated society. Working with an artist, she developed a teaching manual with colorful images and text in several languages that is used in educational presentations. She hired a female driver to transport groups of women seeking health services, as cultural norms discourage women from accepting rides from any man who is not a relative. And she promoted acceptance of her programs by convincing those in positions of power that healthy women improve the quality of life for men and children.

 

Click here to vote for Mahhivanan’s video – “Saving Children, Saving Lives.”