Innovative public health academic session - KSHEMA

The Division of Public Health, K S Hegde Medical Academy, Nitte University and CHD Group jointly conducted an innovative public health academic session on Systems thinking in public health applications on 19th Sept 2017. Mr. Rajendra Bendre, Founder, Creative Wandering was the key trainer for the session. The session introduced public health thinkers to the flaws inherent in our thought processes when it comes to dealing with complex, volatile, uncertain, chaotic and ambiguous social systems through which human life is engineered. The different tools used in systems thinking like Ladder of Inference, Causal Loop Diagram, Iceberg Models and other mental models of thinking were discussed and debated and at times contested as well. Concepts and habits of a systems thinker and emergence of the philosophy of systems thinking was discussed and how human mind is often not used to nonlinear thinking and un-intended consequences were also highlighted. Human systems of goal setting and conceptual frameworks to extrapolate systems thinking into mainstream public health were identified.