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Krishnamurthy Jayanna

GFMER Coordinator for India

Krishnamurthy Jayanna
Dr Krishnamurthy Jayanna, MD
Deputy Project Director: Sukshema project, Karnataka Health Promotion Trust, Bangalore, India
Associate Professor: St John’s Research Institute, Bangalore, India

Dr Krishnamurthy Jayanna is a public health specialist from India working in various areas of sexual and reproductive health within India. Largely he is associated in designing and implementing of programs and conducting operations research in the areas of HIV, maternal, newborn and child health. Currently he is the deputy project director of a Gates foundation funded project in Karnataka, India that aims at improving the maternal, newborn and child health outcomes in the poorly performing districts through technical support to national rural health mission, Karnataka(NRHM). Within this project, he is the technical lead for implementing facility based interventions and also the principal investigator of a randomized cluster control trial that is testing the effectiveness of onsite mentoring to improve the quality of delivery and postpartum care in primary health centers of North Karnataka. In the past he was involved in various capacities in the implementation and management of major HIV prevention, care and support projects funded by Gates foundation, USAID and Global fund.

Dr Krishnamurthy has completed his MBBS and MD in Community Medicine from South India after which he worked with UNICEF in the area of child health before taking up lead roles in HIV, maternal, newborn and child health in KHPT. During 2007, he attended the training in research methods in sexual and reproductive health offered by GFMER and WHO. He is pursuing postdoctoral research fellowship in the IID&GHTP (International Infectious Diseases and Global Health Training Program) with University of Manitoba supported by CIHR (Canadian Institutes for Health Research). His focus in the fellowship is on the quality of maternal and newborn services. He is also an honorary faculty with St John’s research institute, Bangalore and Department of Community Health Sciences, University of Manitoba, Canada and has been guiding a number of postgraduate trainees in their dissertation and internship work.

In India, Dr Krishnamurthy has contributed to several state and national level consultations and policy guidelines related to HIV and MNCH. He is also a master trainer and a lead resource person for a number of trainings and evaluations. He has had several publications in peer reviewed journals, contributed to a number of research reports and training manuals and presented in many conferences at national and international level.

Country situation of sexual and reproductive health

With the advent of National Rural Health Mission (NRHM) in 2005, the country has had steady progress in several areas of reproductive health. The IMR has declined to 47 per 1000 live births in 2010. The MMR declined from 254 in 2004-06 to 212 in 2009. The TFR declined from 2.9 in 2005 to 2.6 in 2009. As per the coverage evaluation survey (2009-2010), 90% of pregnant women have sought ANC care at least once; skilled attendance at birth has gone up to 76%. Several factors of NRHM contributed to this progress such as provisions to employ contractual staff to fill up vacancies in the public facilities, upgradation of primary health centres to provide round the clock (24/7) services, providing financial flexibility through the provision of untied funds at all levels of health system, implementing innovations and financial schemes to increase the coverage of institutional services to rural communities, strengthening referral linkages through institutionalizing emergency ambulance services, deployment of accredited social health activitists (ASHA) at village level to mobilize and follow up pregnant and recently delivered women, initiation of health management information systems and mother child tracking system to track every single mother and newborn and strengthening the community monitoring systems and several others.

Yet, when we refer to the millennium development goals that the country has proposed to achieve by 2015, we still have much to do. While the MDG targets to be reached by 2015 for MMR, U5MR and IMR are 109, 42 and 26.7 respectively, at the current pace, the country may be able to reach up to 135, 70 and 46 respectively falling short of the targets significantly. . The variations and inequities between states, urban-rural populations, male and female sexes continue to impact the aggregates. Other concerns continue to exist in quality and access issues such as the full ANC coverage which was just about 26.5%; only 31% of the women consumed IFA tablets for more than 100 days; 36% women had to walk for more than 3 kms to access ANC services; nearly 50% women had travelled a distance of more than 8 kms for institutional delivery services; only 40% newborns were initiated breast feeding within the first hour and only 33% of the children had been given exclusive breast feeding for 6 months. With only a few more years left to 2015, there is a need for a renewed planning and action with a focus on critical set of life saving maternal and newborn services in the regions that have large coverage gaps.

Candidates from India who took the SRH/GFMER course in past

References and links