Dr. Pritpal S Tamber is an independent writer, researcher, and consultant focussing on community health. His work examines the realities of bridging the health sector and communities.
Dr. Tamber is the former Physician Editor of TEDMED, TED’s dedicated health event. Through that role, he was left convinced that ‘innovation’ in health is unlikely to have much impact on the health of communities in difficult social circumstances, such as poverty or exclusion.
In response, Dr Tamber has founded and run several projects examining the realities of bridging the health sector and communities, including the Creating Health Collaborative, a highly-curated meeting of community-oriented practitioners willing to share the realities of their health-related work, and Community Agency & Health, a two-day symposium in Oakland, CA, that explored how the health sector might work differently to better understand communities.
Through his work, Dr. Tamber has learned that a core issue is health care’s inability to appreciate health as more than ‘the absence of disease’. This has fuelled the disconnect between the health sector and communities, and, to some extent, fuelled medicalization, health care inflation and the rise of non-communicable chronic conditions.
To help overcome this, Dr. Tamber has discerned 12 practice-based principles for how to build a bridge between the health sector and communities.
For the health sector, the principles encourage its leaders to acknowledge people’s social contexts, something that is known to be responsible for up to 80% of health. For communities, the principles have the potential to foster their agency – their ability to influence their circumstances. This is known to be core to health.
Fundamentally, Dr. Tamber’s work illustrates how the health sector has to radically renegotiate its relationship with citizens and society.
Dr. Tamber now produces Community & Health, a regular newsletter in which he reviews often-overlooked evidence, shares the work of courageous community-oriented practitioners, and comments on work described as ‘community health’ or the ‘social determinants of health’. He also consults to organizations willing to considering their broader impact on health, such as those in health care and real estate.
Dr. Tamber is the former Medical Director of Map of Medicine, a company that produced 'clinical pathways' to improve the flow of patients through health care systems. He's also the former Editorial Director for Medicine for BioMed Central, the company that disrupted academic publishing by making open access commercially sustainable. He started his career as an editor at The BMJ (formerly known as the British Medical Journal).
