Deadline: 2-Jul-23
The Health Systems Transformation Platform (HSTP) is offering the ‘Health Journalism Fellowship’ of six months duration to five early-career journalists with a learning opportunity on healthcare and health systems issues, encouraging them to critically investigate public health issues and report in an informed and nuanced manner.
Health Systems Transformation Platform (HSTP) is a not-for-profit organization with the mission to enable the Indian health system to respond to people’s needs.
The objectives of the fellowship are to enable an ecosystem of information exchange between the public health community and the media, provide early-career journalists with the opportunity to broaden their careers in the health beat and improve their understanding of healthcare and health systems and enhance media coverage of public health issues. The selected journalists will receive an award of rupees 1,00,000 along with professional guidance from mentors and participation in an orientation training workshop.
Focus areas of the fellowship
- They encourage fellows to take up issues of public health importance, which are often neglected in the mainstream media. They would be keen on ideas that investigate public health issues by delving into the perspectives of patients, healthcare providers, or administrators, among others.
- The fellowship programme would be keen to emphasize aspects, including the availability of medicines, competencies of human resources in health, skill mix for delivering primary healthcare or addressing disease control and outbreaks, the post-pandemic response of health systems, the significance of healthcare financing and planning, home healthcare, one health, digital health, and emergency care systems in the context of how they impact service delivery and the overall health systems. Media articles could be in rural, tribal, hilly, urban, or remote areas of the country.
- Preference would be given to those who prioritize the priority states where HSTP is working namely, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Odisha, and the Northeastern states.
Benefits
- Duration and award: The six-month fellowship will be offered from August 2023 to January 2024 for Rs 1,00,000 per fellow for the entire duration of the fellowship, which would include travel and other expenses.
Eligibility Criteria
- The applicant must be a graduate in any discipline, an Indian citizen below the age of 32 years, and currently working as a journalist (full-time, part-time, or freelance) with print, broadcast, or digital media, have an established record of publishing media articles/videos in English, Hindi, or any Indian vernacular language in print/digital platforms and at least three years of experience in journalism.
Application and Selection Process
- Interested candidates are required to submit a complete application through the Google form with all mandatory information. Candidates can propose more than one idea for the fellowship, from one or more than one focus area of the programme (describing the topic, why it is important, the setting, stakeholders involved and likely impact or contribution of the idea); motivation for applying to the fellowship and an updated resume, cover letter, and two previously released media articles/videos in print or digital platforms, newspapers, or magazines).
- Applications will be screened based on eligibility criteria, and the relevance and strength of the proposed story idea with the fellowship’s focus, prior work in public health/health and relevant work experience in journalism. Shortlisted candidates will be called for an online interview.
- Selected fellows are expected to provide a letter from their employer/editor endorsing their participation in the fellowship, or a letter of support from a print/broadcast/digital media house indicating their willingness to issue their articles/videos.
For more information, visit HSTP.