Need to involve relevant stakeholders –lessons from NFHS data

Contextualizing data to their settings is perhaps the most important step in deriving a meaning from them. This is no less true for health data. The National Health Survey data are an excellent source of information; however, its strength may not be its contextualization. Our habit of, for example, doing primary care without family physicians or doing public health without understanding the complete domain and involvement of its proponent seems to have extended to this exercise (collection of National Health Survey data) as well. Relegating health data to statistics and calculus alone should be a pitfall all of us must avoid. Identifying the right stakeholders to understand the complexity of health data is the key.