Kavita Narayan
Technical Advisor, HRH for Health systems at Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, GoI (India)
As one of the youngest and first Indian Fellows of The American College of Healthcare Executives (ACHE), Kavita has more than eighteen years of combined experience as a hospital and health systems architect and thought leader in the United States and India. Kavita currently serves as Technical Advisor to the National Human Resources for Health Cell, an internal think-tank for People for Health reforms that she worked to establish in 2016 within the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare. Most recently, this structure has been further enhanced to undertake system transformation activities pertaining to the MoHFW, as part of the Hon PM’s Mission Karmayogi program. Her relentless championing since her return to India for recognition and regulatory reform of allied professionals to enable a more equitable, efficient health system, has resulted in the enactment of the National Commission for Allied and Healthcare professions Act 2021. In addition to improving access to affordable care at all levels, this reform aims to formally recognise and create local and global opportunities for a large variety of allied and health care professionals.
Her other critical policy contributions have been in the areas of skill development strategy for the health sector, the establishment of the National Medical Commission, ongoing reforms in Nursing regulation among several others. In 2018, under her technical leadership, India systematically quantified and reported its 7 million+ health workforce for the first time on the WHO platform, recently enabling a major favourable shift in the global labour outmigration policy.
Since March 2020, Kavita’s major technical thrust has also been to bolster the health system’s capacity building efforts for CoVID response by coordinating with key stakeholders and states to train, deploy and leverage critical resources dynamically; workforce, drugsand recently vaccines. She has also led specific efforts on behaviour change communication and mental health management strategies during the pandemic, among others. Most recently, she has been inducted as a Fellow of class 8 of the Ananta Aspen Centre’s Kamalnayan Bajaj Fellowship.