Dear HIFA colleagues,
I am delighted to be joining the HIFA community, and I wanted to share a little about what brought me to global health and why the HIFA mission resonates so deeply with me.
My journey began with clinical medicine. My father was an engineer, and I seem to have inherited from him a strong mathematical, logical and linguistic bent. He had hoped that I might pursue engineering, administration or entrepreneurship, and I had offers from some of India's leading institutions, including BITS Pilani. Yet I was quite determined to become a doctor. I genuinely felt that medicine was one of the highest callings one could have: the privilege of being able to heal another human being.
During medical school, however, an important tension began to emerge. I would spend hours in the wards and library, immersed in Harrison's and learning about increasingly complex diseases, while becoming increasingly aware of how little we could do for many patients who reached us too late. So much remained at the frontier of research, yet much of what we already knew could also have made a profound difference if it had reached people earlier.
That realisation became particularly powerful during my rural training in Maharashtra. While many of my peers were preparing to move to the UK or US and sit for licensing examinations, I was seeing patients presenting with advanced cancers, severe anaemia, malaria and other conditions where relatively simple, timely interventions could have changed the trajectory of their lives.
I remember thinking: perhaps the greatest opportunity is not always in discovering something new, but in making sure that what we already know actually reaches the people who need it.
That, in many ways, was the beginning of my journey towards global health, although I would only recognise it as such much later.
Between 2007 and 2013, as the wife of a diplomat, I lived in Syria. This was a formative period in which I began to understand humanitarian and disaster relief, the complexities of working in a politically sensitive region, and the ways in which global power dynamics can shape the realities of people's lives.
Our subsequent relocation to Berlin opened another unexpected door. I applied for postgraduate studies in International Health at Charité–Universitätsmedizin Berlin, initially perhaps without fully appreciating how closely this field aligned with the questions that had been taking shape within me since medical school and my experiences in Syria.
When we relocated to India, I was fortunate to work in the International Health Division of the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare. This brought me closer to the policy and institutional dimensions of global health and to the realities of translating international commitments into national priorities and action.
In Geneva I confronted the gap between knowledge, systems and action. Once again, I was seeing the same underlying problem that had first troubled me during my rural medical training. Knowledge matters enormously, but its existence alone does not guarantee that it will reach the people who need it, in a form they can understand and use, at the time they need it most.
My subsequent work across global health policy, health systems, emergencies and academia has continued to reinforce this conviction.
It has also strengthened my interest in knowledge translation, particularly in low- and middle-income countries and the Indian subcontinent. I am interested in how we can make knowledge more accessible, locally relevant and actionable, while recognising the languages, cultures, constraints and lived realities of the communities and health workers it is intended to serve.
Why HIFA resonates with me
This is why I feel such a strong connection with HIFA.
The proposition that access to reliable, understandable and actionable health information can influence whether a person makes a good health decision speaks directly to the question that has followed me throughout my career:
How do we make the things that are already possible actually reach the people who need them?
For me, this is not simply a technical question about communication or dissemination. It is also a question of equity, health systems, local ownership and whose knowledge is recognised, whose voices are heard, and whether the information available to people enables them to make informed decisions about their health.
I look forward to learning from colleagues across countries and disciplines, sharing perspectives shaped by my experiences in clinical medicine, international public health, humanitarian contexts and global health policy, and contributing to HIFA's collective efforts to close the gap between health knowledge and health action.
I am grateful to Dr Meena Nathan Cherian and Dr Neil Pakenham-Walsh for welcoming me into this community. I look forward to connecting with you all and learning from the important work taking place across HIFA.
Warm regards,
Dr Archana Seahwag
Global Health | Clinical Medicine | Public Health | Health Systems & Knowledge Translation
WHO HQ Geneva | Ministry of Health & Family Welfare, India | Charité–Universitätsmedizin Berlin
archanaseahwag.int@gmail.com
Archana Seahwag
MD,DTMPH,MScIH
HIFA profile: Archana Seahwag is a global health professional with over a decade of multidisciplinary experience spanning clinical medicine, international public health, and global health diplomacy. Her work includes technical and policy roles at WHO Headquarters in Geneva, the Ministry of Health & Family Welfare (India), and international academic institutions such as Charité–Universitätsmedizin Berlin.
E: archanaseahwag.int AT gmail.com