Orissa chief minister Naveen Patnaik (third from left) at the inauguration of the Asian Institute of Public Health. Picture by Sanjib Mukherjee

Bhubaneswar, Nov. 2: Asian Institute of Public Health (AIPH), touted as Asia’s first institute dedicated to public health, was launched today in association with the University of Maryland, Baltimore.

With it, comes an array of teaching, training and project-related development programmes aiming to strengthen the technical and management capacity of human resources in public health.

The institute would serve as an organised intellectual resource centre and would target scholars, including medical officers, ayurveda, yoga and naturopathy, unani, siddha and homeopathy doctors, personnel from international and national health agencies, national, provincial and district health managers, social scientists, corporate sector among others.

With faculty from both within the country and the US, along with web-based distant learning modules, the institute will offer certificates, diplomas and degrees of international standard in public health.

It will focus on health systems strengthening, capacity development, occupational health, road traffic accidents, health insurance, public private partnerships, community based surveillance, tobacco and emerging diseases.

“We will work on large-scale surveillance studies of neonatal infection in hospitals and in the community, training of physicians and other paramedical workers on essential newborn care and resuscitation to prevent birth asphyxia, pro-biotic studies to prevent neonatal sepsis and other infections, and surveillance of tobacco use during pregnancy and knowledge of women on associated health hazards,” said N.K. Ganguly, the president of the board of the institute.

“It will open new doors for future collaborations with our faculty in the fields of medicine nursing and social work besides addressing many unmet needs of public health in India,” said David Ramsay, the president of University of Maryland, Baltimore, which funds the infrastructure of the institute.