The Centre for Health Policy and Planning, the new public health wing of the Kerala University for Health and Allied Sciences (KUHAS), was inaugurated here on Friday.
The first off-campus centre of KUHAS, the centre will also function as the regional office of the university, which has under its jurisdiction 250 medical and paramedical educational institutions across the State.
Inaugurating the centre, Health Minister V.S. Sivakumar said the institution’s primary goal would be to conduct comprehensive and scientific studies in the areas of health policy formulation, planning, and research and development, and advise the State government on the same.
The centre would function in close coordination with the State Planning Board and other academic institutions such as the Centre for Development Studies and the Achutha Menon Centre for Health Science Studies here.
It would be the centre’s mandate to collate and analyse public health data from across the State and epidemiological research and disease surveillance studies and advise the government on preventive health and disease-control measures to be adopted.
PhD programmesMr. Sivakumar said PhD programmes would be launched at the centre. The government had allocated a sum of Rs.1 crore for preliminary expenses for setting up the centre. Steps were being taken to find land to construct a permanent building for the centre, he said.
He congratulated KUHAS Vice Chancellor K. Mohandas, who has been leading the university ever since it was set up in 2009, for the far-reaching measures he had implemented in improving academic excellence in the medical education sector and the administrative measures initiated to improve the conduct of examinations and training for faculty.
