Meet Our Board of Directors

Dr Patricia Day Bidinger
Director, Institute for Rural Health Studies (IRHS)

Dr. Bidinger obtained her BS from the University of California and MS and PhD from Cornell University where she was a National Institutes of Health Fellow. She underwent practical medical training in New York and rural areas of the US, as well as at the Government Maternity Hospital and the Osmania General Hospital in Hyderabad, India. She is an early Ashoka Fellow and has also won the Ashoka and Mc Kinsey & Co. Community-Based Investment Award.

In 1981, she co-founded the Institute for Rural Health Studies (IRHS), a non-profit that delivers quality healthcare to some of the poorest rural communities in Andhra Pradesh, using paramedics rather than doctors. The IRHS clinics provide health care and medical testing including a protective medical specialist referral system linked to Patient Counsellors located in Hyderabad's central bus terminal office. A connected system then links patients to trained Patient Counsellors in Hyderabad government hospitals as well as private facilities. The bus terminal office also provides sound advice to patients throughout the state seeking ethical and cost-effective health care, advice on HIV-prevention, reproductive health, lifestyle counseling, BP and blood sugar measurements. The IRHS also runs the state's only rural-based programme to detect pre-cancerous lesions of the cervix using colposcopy and cryotherapy.

Dr Bidinger has also published in peer-reviewed journals on a wide variety of subjects during her 34 years in India.