Lecture Series

Edwin van Teijlingen
on
PARI: Strengthening Health Research in Nepal

Nepal has limited capacity in health research. As a result, it leads to a restriction in the ability to implement evidence-based health care. PARI (Partnership on Improving Access to Research Literature for Higher Education Institutions in Nepal), a partnership between Tribhuvan University, three UK universities (Bournemouth, Sheffield, and Aberdeen), and the Development Resource Centre, Kathmandu, is a project aimed at supporting and enhancing health research in Nepal.

The main objective of PARI is to move university lecturers away from textbook teaching and make them more critical of the academic literature available on the Internet. This lecture will dwell on the experience of PARI so far as it conducts workshops in Nepali universities introducing the foundations of evidence-based practice and outline key electronic databases of healthcare and health-service literature available to Nepali academics. These workshops were informed by: i) a curriculum review of all health-related courses at the major universities in Nepal, and ii) a needs assessment with lecturers, librarians, and students of the major universities. Learning from this experience, the lecture will suggest how best we can move away from textbook teaching in healthcare and teach healthcare discipline students how to find the most appropriate evidence-based treatment for each patient.

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Edwin van Teijlingen is Professor of Reproductive Health Research at Bournemouth University, UK. He is trained as a sociologist and his interests lie in mixed methods research, qualitative and evaluation research. A large share of his academic work has been in the field of public health and the organisation of maternity care with publications of more than 200 papers, book chapters, and books. He is Visiting Professor at Nobel College affiliated with Pokhara University and Manmohan Memorial Institute of Health Sciences affiliated with Tribhuvan University. He is book review editor of Sociological Research Online.

Professor van Teijlingen has edited several books, including Midwifery and Medicalization of Childbirth: Comparative Perspectives (2004), Birth by Design: Pregnancy, Midwifery Care and Midwifery in North America and Europe (2001), which was short-listed for the 2004 BSA Medical Sociology Book Prize. Most recently he is co-editor of The Dynamics of Health in Nepal, published by Social Science Baha.