Nurse who would be doctor!

Nurse who would be doctor!

TRAINED AT CIVIL, POISED TO FINISH PHD IN GERMANY

Parth.Shastri@timesgroup.com

Ahmedabad:  08.11.2020 

Come 2021, and Krupali Patel, a native of Vadodara, who was trained as a nurse at Civil Hospital, will receive her doctoral degree from University of Bonn in Germany! Krupali is currently working on her thesis on zoonotic diseases and understanding the transmission of superbugs such as Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) from animals to humans and vice versa.

Patel, the daughter of a lab technician and homemaker in Vadodara, recently connected with students and researchers at her alma mater, Indian Institute of Public Health, Gandhinagar (IIPHG), in a webinar, sharing her experiences.

“I got interested in the healthcare sector and pursued a diploma in nursing, followed by a BSc degree,” recounts Krupali. “But I wanted to go beyond the routine and got an opportunity to work on a project linking WASH (water, sanitation and hygiene) with maternal mortality rate (MMR) in India and Bangladesh.”

The project got her interested in public health and she enrolled in the Master in Public Health (MPH) course at IIPH-G. Her interest in zoonotic diseases (diseases spread from animals to humans) and drug-resistant bacteria continued even after her graduation, as she got selected in a very competitive process for a doctoral study at the Centre for Development Research at University of Bonn.

“My focus is on MRSA and factors affecting it such as weather conditions. I collected the samples from 300 households in Ahmedabad keeping cattle in different seasons and studied the distribution pattern,” she said. “The data analysis is on, and I am hopeful of submitting my findings soon.”

Deepak Saxena, a professor at IIPH-G and mentor to Patel, said that she’s working in a field less explored. “In India and elsewhere, the superbug study model is primarily hospital-based. But she has taken the community health approach where she has taken samples from animals and humans to understand the spread pattern of the drug-resistant bacteria,” he said. “I am sure it would add a new dimension to how we look at the subject in the context of India.”

Krupali Patel