Dalai Lama Fellows

Leadership Vision

“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die discover that I had not lived.” – Henry David Thoreau

Project Description

The Compassion-In-Action project has two components.

The first is a participatory research exercise in which our team will seek to understand the health needs, preferences, and experiences with the health-care system of residents of Shireen Jinnah Colony, an urban slum in Karachi. This will be coupled with a household survey that will measure current levels of out-of-pocket health expenditure in the community. The second component develops a model of community-based management of hypertension. Trained lay health workers in the community would partner with a staff member in a local clinic to treat women with high blood pressure, a condition that often goes untreated in low-resource settings and is the biggest cause of mortality in Pakistan. The participatory research and the hypertension program will pave the way for the development of a testable model of community-based health insurance, in which care is delivered both by clinical staff of our local clinic partner – SINA – and by lay health workers, and is financed by the community. While I do not expect to pilot this program in the Fellowship year, the insights gained will be in service of piloting this post graduation.