Dr Fauziah Rabbani
Professor and Acting Chair, Department of Community Health Sciences
fauziah.rabbani@aku.edu

Academic Qualification and Training

Dr Fauziah Rabbani, Professor and Acting Chair, Department of Community Health Sciences at Aga Khan University . She is a MBBS from Karachi (merit scholar), a Masters in Public Health from USA (AKU scholar, Dean's list at UAB) and board certified (FCPS in Community Medicine) from College of Physicians and Surgeons of Pakistan. She has been associated with AKU, Karachi as faculty since 1989 and has been contributing extensively in teaching, service and research.  

Her special interest is health care administration/health systems development. She has served in numerous academic and administrative positions including being the acting chair of the Department of Community Health Sciences (CHS) from January-December 2004. Dr Rabbani has been heading the Health Systems Division (HSD) at CHS which is the focus of AKU's urban and rural community based health system prototypes and emphasises health policies, organisational design, structures, processes and supporting factors that are critical to the health of Pakistanis. Her particular skills are performance management, quality of care evaluations, conducting health situation analysis, managerial assessments, priority setting, project planning, human resource management, performance appraisals and preparing Logical Framework Analysis (LFAs). At university level she has been the member of several important committees most notably Committee for Faculty Development (CFD), MCFC, HSCC, MCCGP and Curriculum Renewal Task Force.

She has also been teaching and directing AKU's MSc Health Policy and Management (HPM) Programme and supervised many MSc theses. MSc HPM is the first of its type in Pakistan to address management training and policy development skills specifically for health professionals. She was also the Principal Coordinator of Urban Health Programme (UHP) which is the framework for most of AKU's community based educational initiatives, as well as a range of intervention projects. UHP enjoys recognition from the World Health Organisation (WHO) in the form of a Universities in Solidarity for the Health of Disadvantaged (UNISOL) grant for which she was the Principal Investigator ( www.who.int/mipfiles/2362/ UNISOL .pdf ). A training manual for health providers was also developed as a result of this project.

In 2005 she completed a year's sabbatical at IHCAR Division of International Health, Deptment of Public Health Sciences, Karolinska Institutet Sweden working with Health Systems and Policy group headed by Professor Goran Tomson ( www.phs.ki.se/ihcar/hsp/staff/ rabbani .html) . She is an enrolled PhD candidate in Health Systems Research at Karolinska Institutet which is a four year programme with coursework in Sweden and data collection at Aga Khan University Hospital (AKUH) focusing on hospital evaluation and management studies. Dr Rabbani is now working to evolve a Swedish South Asian Network on Health Administration Research and Training in collaboration with IHCAR, Department of Public Health Sciences, Medical Management Centre Karolinska Institutet and Stockholm University School of Business. In conjunction with these foreign collaborators a regional workshop on Health Administration: Strategic Planning and Performance Management was organised in 2006 ( www. sasnet .lu.se/sspmreport06.pdf) . With funding from WHO EMRO and Swedish South Asian Network (SASNET) a publication titled "Assuring Quality of Services: The Development of a Performance Measurement Framework for AKUH Karachi, Pakistan" was then launched highlighting the work in progress on performance measurement at AKUH. In the long term Dr Rabbani will be working towards a graduate programme in Hospital Management for AKU.

Her scholarly work consists of obtaining grants (WHO-EMRO, WHO-UNISOL, AKU- URC, Swedish Institute (SI) and SASNET to mention a few), guiding and collaborating research with other AKU departments, presenting papers in international and national conferences by invitation, and serving in national and international forae (e.g. WHO) as technical advisor. Acting as a WHO-EMRO consultant in 2003, she designed and delivered a week's course at Cairo , Egypt on Health Systems Research for members of all EMRO countries. Based on her scholarly deliberations AKU was designated as a pilot site by WHO for teaching Violence and Injury Prevention curriculum in 2004. She has several peer reviewed publications, including book chapters to credit. Dr Rabbani has also received Pakistan Academy of Medical Sciences (PAMS) Gold Medal Award for Research.

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