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Rajeev Seth

Child Health and Development Center, University of California San Francisco Medical Center, Children's Hospital of Los Angeles, All India Institute of Medical Sciences

ORCID iD 0000-0001-6870-4280
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About

Dr Rajeev Seth is a senior consultant social pediatrician, trained at All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) India and the University of California San Francisco, USA. Dr Seth has more than 30 years of experience in his field of social and community pediatrics. He still remains in good standing at the American Board of Pediatrics. He has proven leadership skills and expertise in management of community health care projects to improve public health care outcomes in marginalized communities. Dr Seth is a passionate advocate of innovative research, training and education in the field of children rights to health and prevention of diseases by vaccinations. His special strength is in working for strategic organizational goals and team outcomes. He maintains excellent communication & interpersonal skills with his team.

In 1998, Dr Seth left USA and returned to India to follow his inner call to serve the child health and welfare of the marginalized. As co-founder of BUDS India (www.budngo.org), Dr Seth has led a range of primary health care community projects, conducted innovative research; provided rights-based development support, protection and rehabilitation services to the most marginalized children and youth in India. As a Managing Trustee of BUDS, he provides primary health care through a mobile health van in marginalized communities in NCT region of Delhi and poor aspiration district of Nuh, Haryana, India BUDS team works on the principles of 3 Ps; (a) Prevention of Disease by Vaccinations; (b) Promotion of health in underprivileged schools, urban slums and rural poor villages;(c) Prompt treatment through delivery of primary health care services by a state of art mobile health van (MHV). BUDS team is going to celebrate its 20th year anniversary in August 2023.

BUDS team have well established community-based centers for alternative education and social behavior change communication (SBCC) based Drop-in Centre’s (DIC) in both urban slums (7 DICs) and remote rural regions (4 DIC). Vulnerable girls and youth who have dropped out of school for multiple reasons are given a second chance for functional literacy by enrolment in an 18-month functional literacy course, with opportunities for exposure trips, vocational skill development training and capacity building through building their communication and life skills and abilities to obtain jobs in order to succeed in the real world. Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, BUDS staff remained engaged with the health and welfare needs of the communities, provided primary health care and access ot vaccinations through social mobilization, communication, training and support to frontline health workers, promotion social behavioral change and prevention of violence against women and girls by individual patient care, counseling and referral services. BUDS launched innovative online and offline research projects, which were successfully completed during the COVID pandemic. Majority of the recent community-based research in marginalized communities has focused on to improve the uptake and removal of vaccine hesitancy to COVID and other routine childhood vaccinations.
BUDS and Dr Seth as Principal Investigator (PI) has received several academic grants, honors, awards and international publications. BUDS received the Indo-US R03Grant (2015- 2017) National Institute of Health USA & Department of Biotechnology, Government of India; US grand challenge Bill Melinda Gates Grand Challenge Award (2017-2019); 2020 Sabin Vaccine Institute, Washington DC, USA Grant awardees, with colleagues at the Bloomberg School of Public Health, JHU. Dr Seth and team had established an innovation lab to pilot their virtual research “Addressing barriers to vaccine acceptance through community health worker-led interventions” at Nuh district, Haryana, India. During the COVID Pandemic, BUDS established two Vaccination Knowledge Hubs (VKH) in blocks of Nuh and Taurus, Nuh, Haryana. These VKH became the centers for training the peer leaders (15-30 years) in SBCC strategies, development of IEC materials in local language, slogans, social media videos to advocate for removal of vaccine hesitancy, movies of vaccine champions, training of frontline health workers, religious leaders and panchayats (the elected village headman and his cabinet), community influencers, teachers, committed care takers and parents.

Employment

  • Child Health and Development Center Medical Director
    1998 - 2023

Education

  • University of California San Francisco Medical Center Diplomate of American Board
    1992 - 1993
  • Children's Hospital of Los Angeles Post Doctoral fellowship
    1989 - 1992
  • All India Institute of Medical Sciences MD
    1984 - 1987

Projects & Funding

Projects & funding information is unavailable.

Publications (8)