The ICICI Centre for Child Health and Nutrition(ICCHN)

ICCHN’s Research Approach and Practice

ICCHN strongly believes that rigorous research can and must be generated to continuously address critical knowledge and practice gaps to advance innovation in and improve the implementation of public health programmes. Moreover, such research cannot be viewed as an indulgence in resource-poor settings, but needs to be at its most creative, sensitive and relevant precisely in those contexts. This requires sustained long-term investment in initiatives and institutions that can (1) create collaborative spaces to undertake and disseminate contextually-informed and practice-oriented research and (2) promote sectoral capacity building initiatives to encourage and engage different stakeholders in the research process and its application.

ICCHN’s research practice derives from current understandings of the complex causal pathways to infant and child health outcomes, the intimate interrelationships with the health and nutritional status of women across their lifecycles and the various socioeconomic and systemic determinants at work in diverse contexts. The Centre’s overall research agenda therefore broadly encompasses:

Within this overall agenda, ICCHN’s research projects involve multidisciplinary approaches and mixed methodologies, including systematic reviews, evidence synthesis and field-based research studies and trials to:

Investigate and understand the determinants, especially understudied socioeconomic and systemic drivers of undernutrition and ill health
Evaluate and analyse the effectiveness of interventions in terms of processes and outcomes, including economic analyses
Study and analyse systems of delivery and resourcing required to mainstream and scale effective community-based and health systems strategies.

Importantly, however, research has not been conceptualised as separate from programmes, but as an integral dimension of public health practice. Consequently, ICCHN seeks to learn from pioneering research initiatives to integrate robust research and evaluation into policy and programmatic environments, applying them at different scales and building multi-leveled research teams drawing on local talent.

In doing so, ICCHN develops and networks public health research field sites in different contexts, representing socioeconomic and geographic diversity and the plurality of community structures and health systems in India. It is hoped that these action-research sites will serve as critical learning grounds to develop and evaluate complex interventions and to analyse community-based and systemic change over time and in a comparative framework. The Centre’s Research Team also explores opportunities to nest further studies within existing field sites and to set up new sites, especially in underserved and understudied terrains. ICCHN believes that it is critical for these sites to be based on a strong conceptual framework and a well articulated approach to ethical research practice, strong local partnerships and local capacity, high standards and systems for data collection, and analysis and participatory dissemination to local communities and health systems.

ICCHN’s Principles and Goals in Public Health Research

To develop high quality policy and practice-oriented research designed to inform and catalyse the process of mainstreaming and scaling effective interventions to improve public health outcomes in India, especially the health and nutrition of women and young children
To create and network excellent public health research sites and databases and thereby help shape a research approach that supports and sustains contextual, participatory, and ethical public health research.
To strengthen multidisciplinary public health research capacity in India with an emphasis on engaging diverse stakeholders (including local communities, field staff, service providers, implementers and policymakers) in the research process. The Centre’s initiatives will try to ensure the development and retention of local research capacities to sustain ongoing analysis and appropriate application.
To actively create opportunities for and innovate in the methods of disseminating research findings in order to enhance their impact on policy and practice.
To provide a dynamic forum for interaction and collaboration between biomedical and social science researchers and between researchers, policymakers and practitioners.
To develop and demonstrate the possibilities of productive and equitable research partnerships (across disciplines and sectors and with national and international institutions) to advance knowledge and practice in public health.