2018•03•16     Kuala Lumpur

UNU-IIGH hosted a SCHEMA seminar featuring talks by Professor Shantini Paranjothy from Cardiff University, “The Power of Big Data for Informing Child Health Services” and by Dr. Arunah Chandran, a Maternal and Child Health Officer with the Ministry of Health Malaysia and a PhD. Candidate at University Malaya, “Gender Responsiveness of Non-Communicable Disease (NCD) Policies.”

Professor Paranjothy’s talk focused on large-scale cohort studies of infants and children in Wales. It explored how anonymised big-data can be used to determine social factors increasing health risks of infant and children, enabling better policy design and implementation targeting at-risk populations. Dr. Arunah’s talk described the importance of moving beyond gender-blind health policies and expanding the scope of women’s health beyond the reproductive and sexual focus. There is a growing recognition of the critical influence social determinants of health have on NCDs. The same social and environmental context has very different impacts on men and women, and effective policy must recognise this.

The talks are part of a series of academic exchanges under the SCHEMA project, funded by a British Council Newton-Ungku-Omar Institutional Links Grant. Professor Paranjothy and Dr. Arunah are SCHEMA workshop alumni, having participated in the SCHEMA workshop on nature-based infrastructure and health held in Kuching in January 2017 and the SCHEMA workshop on food systems and health held in Penang in December 2017 respectively.

Professor Shantini presenting her talk. Photo: UNU-IIGH. Creative Commons BY-NC 2.0

Dr Arunah presenting her talk to the audience. Photo: UNU-IIGH. Creative Commons BY-NC 2.0