The Healing Force of Family

Jun 1, 2021

This is the second episode of a two-part series about raising the quality of health care in the developing world.

Even before the onslaught of COVID-19, public health services in many developing countries were chronically strained by a combination of burgeoning populations, severe shortages of trained clinicians, and growing burdens of disease. Noora Health harnesses an untapped resource—the family members of hospital patients in India—by training them in simple medical skills to help their loved ones recover with fewer complications and readmissions once they return home. Noora’s standard of caregiving is already helping to restore trust in India's beleaguered public system and may prove to be a critical element in the country's pursuit of universal health coverage.

This episode tells the story of Noora’s origins as a graduate school project of co-founders Edith Elliott and Shahed Alam and their serendipitous discovery of people's family members as a health resource. Follow their journey as they:

• developed empathy for hospital patients as young teenagers, through the trials of suffering family members of their own (05:02);
• devised a pilot test of their theory of change in an Indian cardiac hospital (10:04);
• determined to turn the school assignment into a professional mission (12:35);
• refined a comprehensive model (14:44) and partnered with the Indian state of Punjab to scale it up (22:47);
• and responded to the COVID-19 crisis in India with novel strategies to help vulnerable families of positive patients stay safe (28:51).

Additional Resources:

• Studies noted or alluded to in the episode:
  • Journal of Global Health Reports on the results of the Noora program on cardiac patient recovery;
  • BMJ Global Health article citing newborn care results to advocate for the importance of family-focused postnatal education.
• The Noora Health channel on YouTube, providing hundreds of examples of Noora’s materials, including Bollywood-style dramas (mostly in Indian languages).
• Blog post by Noora’s director of training, Anand Kumar, about how Noora began.

The full transcript of the episode can be found at https://ssir.org/podcasts/category/unchartedground.