Catching 'em Young

AddressHealth is looking to build a sustainable model for school health programmes

- Himanshu Kakkar

Both Anoop and I were clear, while pursuing medicine, that we didn’t want to be one of those doctors who sit in clinic and see patients,” smiles Dr Anand Lakshman, founder and CEO, AddressHealth. Dr Anoop Radhakrishnan happens to be Lakshman’s junior from Mysore Medical College and now the co-founder at Address Health. Lakshman graduated from Mysore Medical College in 1999 and later pursued a post-graduate degree in public health from the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai, graduating in 2001. The Bengaluru based social enterprise, among other things, provides a host of paediatric healthcare services to 150 schools in Bengaluru and Hyderabad, covering 1.1 lakh school students, that includes annual health checkups, health education and infirmary services.

“There is a mandate around children’s healthcare in ICSE and CBSE schools and there is also a national programme — Rashtriya Baal Suraksha Programme dedicated to this,” informs Lakshman. CBSE recommends that its schools ensure good healthcare  for students and ICSE mandates that its member schools must have healthcare facilities and check-ups for children.

Before AddressHealth, Lakshman worked with the World Health Organisation (WHO) as a consultant for a tuberculosis programme in West Bengal in early 2000. In FY09, when Lakshman started working for the project to scale up zinc treatment for diarrhea, he got a grant of ₹92 crore from the Children Investment Fund and Melinda Gates Foundation to expand to Bihar, UP, and Gujarat. But while administrating that grant, Lakshman realised that for healthcare to create a wider impact, one had to come up with a market-based solution instead of depending on grants. “We cannot be dependent on grants or charity because each donor will have their own perspective and they would want things to be in line with their priorities.”