On Meaningful Work #20: Dr. Armida Fernandez

Hello Everyone and welcome to another episode of the On Meaningful work podcast. In this episode I speak with Dr. Armida Fernandez. Dr. Fernandez started her career working with Mumbai’s urban poor in one of the biggest public hospitals there. Within that labyrinthine system Dr. Fernandez was able to implement real change in how medicine and care were to be administered with a real focus on women and newborn health. When she noticed that the problem of women/newborn health was too multifaceted to be solved within the confines of a public hospital she founded SNEHA a not-for-profit that focused on the health of women and children in Dharavi (Mumbai’s biggest slum) - SNEHA has now grown to 490+ staff working across various communities. Throughout her career Dr Ferandez has worked in extremely challenging circumstances, but she has tackled problems with an entrepreneurial zeal. She has demonstrated enormous confidence in her vision and has backed that up with an ability to articulate that vision and bring people along.  It was a pleasure speaking with her

 

About Dr. Fernandez

 

Dr. Armida Fernandez is the retired dean of Lokmanya Tilak Municipal General Hospital in Mumbai where she was Head of the Dept of Neonatology. She is also retired as the Medical Director of the Holy Family Hospital, Mumbai. She is the founding trustee at SNEHA, an NGO working on health, nutrition and violence in Mumbai's urban slums. She is also the founder of the Romilla palliative care centre. . Her key areas of expertise and interest are promotion of breastfeeding and the care of new born babies especially among the urban poor of Mumbai.  She started the first Human Milk Bank in Asia and has developed many low cost techniques for survival of new born babies. She was named an Ashoka Fellow in 2004 and is the past president of the National Neonatology Forum.