Early in my career as a physician I recognized the critical importance of public health in influencing healthcare delivery and health outcomes. I shifted my career from building an outstanding clinical service provider in Pakistan to a population and public health focus where I would achieve a much broader impact than can be achieved through hospital care alone. I recognized the need to bring much greater attention to the quality teaching and evidence that was influencing policy and practice in the field, where many teaching programs and health interventions suffered from a lack of quality training and evidence, potentially wasting valuable resources that could be more effectively allocated to programs with proven benefit. This transition from clinical care to population and public health has been of great significance.

Key to my success as an academician was joining the Community Health Sciences (CHS), Aga Khan University (AKU) in 1992 as a preceptor in the preceptor program.

The CHS, AKU has a team of outstanding academic and research mentors. More than thirty years of extensive and intensive teaching experience at an international university under the supervision of national and international academics has enabled me to design, develop and conduct courses. Since joining AKU as a faculty member, I have been involved in teaching in different academic programs including undergraduate, graduate, post-graduate and continuing medical education. Over the years, I had the advantage of attending several courses for faculty offered by the department of education (DED) at AKU; and more recently by the Network of Quality, Teaching and Learning (QTL_net) at AKU.

These courses really inspired me to introduce innovative teaching methods in my sessions. I believe that I have been able to significantly improve student engagement and evaluations through these innovations. In future, I will continue to strive and improve the effectiveness of my teaching and hope that I am able to inspire budding professionals graduating from AKU. 

In addition to these curriculum development courses, I also enhanced my skills in various disciplines including ‘Epidemiological Concepts’.

In addition to my academic contributions in undergraduate, graduate and pot-graduate programs at AKU, I also have developed several short courses under the umbrella of Continuing Medical Educational (CME) Program to build the capacity of budding leaders and professionals working in public and private sectors.  These short courses included ‘Hospital Management’, ‘Health System’s Strengthening’, ‘Addressing Gender, Governance and Disrupted Health Systems in Fragile Countries’, ‘Private Sector Engagement’, ‘Epidemiology’, ‘Gender’, ‘Family Planning’, ‘Tuberculosis’, and ‘HIV-AIDS.

Through these courses, there has been a significant increase in the quality of healthcare planning being done in the government and non-governmental organizations and a collective improvement of the overall performance of the health programs. I also have contributed to teaching/learning activities at Health Services Academy, Ministry of Health, Government of Pakistan while she was away from CHS, AKU, because of family commitments. 

I am an internationally recognized academician and a member of ‘Asian Network for Health System’s Strengthening (ANHSS)’ and represent AKU since 2014.

I am a master trainer of various courses including ‘Health sector Reform’ & ‘Public private Partnership’.

I am one of the faculty lead in ANHSS and have been involved in teaching training activities of this network for almost a decade I have also contributed internationally as a master trainer in several courses including ‘Health Sector Reforms for Health System’s Strengthening’ and ‘Public Private Partnership’. 

These high-quality national and international healthcare providers’ training courses and programs in low resource settings represent a major contribution to national and global health. The impact is seen in national and global policy recommendations and in change to practice.

In recognition of my academic contributions, I was awarded ‘AKU Outstanding Teachers Award’ in 2016.

I served at various administrative positions in undergraduate medical education at AKU from my joining till 2016.  I was appointed as the program director of the Master of Health Policy and Management (MHPM) in 2017. As program lead, I introduced several innovations in the program curriculum and its delivery for improving the quality of MHPM.  I instituted a formal mentorship programme for supporting students in managing their personal and professional challenges, improving academic performance, and enhancing their personal and professional development.  As per students’ feedback, this program supported students in acquiring confidence, autonomy, and critical thinking skills.

I changed the program from Master of Science to Master of Health Policy & Management for expanding the eligibility criteria to enhance diversity and open doors for public health professionals having non-science background.  To enhance learning of participants having diverse background ranging from medicine to finance, I introduced new teaching pedagogies, like case-studies, data scenarios, country profiles, that encourage student's active participation and transform them into active learners. For addressing market needs, I developed new courses including ‘Reproductive Health: Policy & Program Management’ and ‘Hospital Management & Administration’.  Further, I successfully introduced ‘Session Evaluation System’ in MHPM to provide students an opportunity to voice their issues, needs, and desires, giving feedback on how a teacher can change his or her sessions to help them perform better in class. Mechanisms were pioneered for incorporating students’ feedback in course planning.  For addressing market needs, I developed new courses including ‘Human resources for Health’, ‘Reproductive Health: Policy & Program Management’ and ‘Hospital Management & Administration’.  In addition to the specialized subject specific courses, I also organized standalone sessions for professional development including communication, ethics, integrity, honesty, leadership, creativity, and time and stress management. My visionary leadership and systematic planning tremendously improved the quality of the MHPM program as evidenced from more than 100% increase in the number of applications, enrolments, and graduations during the last five years.

In addition this program under my leadership has the highest number of enrollment across all the graduate programs.

I use various pedagogies in teaching and learning including case-studies, local scenarios, data sheets, pre-readings, flip classroom, short videos, group discussion, group presentations, experiential learning such as field visits and artwork or poster making. Over the years I have tried a combination of different strategies and found these very helpful in my teaching sessions. They also learn the art of teamwork and leadership during such activities, which is beyond the technical knowledge that they gain on the given topic.  These diverse teaching pedagogies provide students with opportunities for learning from each other’s experiences and apply the concepts they have learned.  The field visits provide them with opportunities to experience the ground level realities and challenges and barriers in providing healthcare.

One of the examples of my teaching excellence is the designing of an international course on ‘Hospital Management’ and its successful conduction thrice in 2021. 

These courses were conducted face to face and online for hospital managers, received overwhelming response, trained more than 100 hospital managers from LMICs, and were extremely well evaluated.

The 1st course was fully online as the COVID-19 was at its peak.  The conduction of an international online course was a new experience and innovative for us which was conducted successfully. `

This course was very well evaluated by course participants.

Based on this successful experience, I developed a 3-credit hour core course on ‘Hospital Management & Administration’ which was offered to MHPM students in 2023.

In 2023, I developed a new graduate program namely ‘Master of Science in Healthcare Management’.  This new graduate program has obtained approval from the AKU’s entities including Masters and Doctoral Education Committee (MDEC), Medical College Committee for Educational Programs (MCCEP), Vice Provost Office, Academic Council and AKU Board of trustees.  This graduate program has been approved by the Higher Education Commission and has been launched 2024 to enroll the 1st Cohort in 2025.

Another example of my creativity is a course on ‘Community-Based Research’ for young students of grades XII & XIII that has been conducted by AKU every year under the umnbrella of ‘AKU Challenge Scholarship’.