National Consultation on “Strengthening the Heat-Related Illness Surveillance and Reporting Framework”

Prof. Preeti Negandhi was invited to the National Consultation on “Strengthening the Heat-Related Illness Surveillance and Reporting Framework” organized by the Health Systems Transformation Platform (HSTP), in collaboration with the Council on Energy, Environment and Water (CEEW), under the Biotechnology Industry Research Assistance Council, Government of India funded project “Making Odisha’s Healthcare Systems Climate Resilient.” The consultation was held on 24 July 2026 at National Institute of Health and Family Welfare (NIHFW), New Delhi.

Prof. Negandhi was one of the speakers for the panel discussion on “Expanding the Surveillance Framework: Capturing Vulnerabilities, Co-morbidities and Risk Factors” and shared her insights on the occupational, behavioural and environmental risk factors to better understand the impact of extreme heat. She highlighted how standard systems often miss heat-related morbidity because routine ICD coding matrices lose the environmental heat trigger and complex host vulnerabilities when thermoregulatory strain exacerbates underlying co-morbidities. She advocated for an expanded, equity-centred surveillance framework. By recognizing that vulnerable cohorts, including children, pregnant women, elderly persons, outdoor workers, and dynamic gig workers, possess fundamentally different social and clinical baselines, she stressed upon the need for targeted, low-cost interventions and community-anchored tracking to turn heat data into life-saving protection.

Her panel included eminent speakers including Dr. Aakash Shrivastava, Additional Director and Head, Centre for Environmental and Occupational Health, Climate Change and Health, NPCCHH, NCDC; Dr. Raj Shankar Ghosh, Senior Advisor, Environmental Health and One Health, PHFI; Dr. Ajay Chauhan, Professor of Medicine, RML Hospital; and Dr. Saurabh Dalal, WHO