BU Research Blog

This week the editor of the International Journal of Social Sciences and Management emailed that the paper ‘Drowning Prevention should be a Public Health Issue in Nepal‘ [1] had been published.  This is the first paper for our Ph.D. student Md. Shafkat Hossain. Shafkat co-authored this paper drowning prevention experts in Nepal, Dr. Bhagabati Sedain and Dr. Puspa Rai Pant and Prof. Aminur Rahman based at CIPRB (the Centre for Injury Prevention and Research, Bangladesh).  

Shafkat’s thesis is part of the interdisciplinary Sonamoni project on drowning prevention in toddlers under the age of two in Bangladesh.  This newly published paper takes lessons learnt from Bangladesh and offers them as ideas to be considered in Nepal.  Nepal is prone to a range of natural disasters; earthquakes being the most widely recognised one. However, many people are at risk of drowning as the serious flooding in the autumn of 2024 showed, but this is not recognised as a serious public health risk in Nepal. Drowning relates to people’s everyday activities such as crossing rivers, bathing and swimming and should be treated as a social and public health problem.

The Sonamoni project is being coordinated by Bournemouth University in collaboration with the University of the West of England, Bristol, the University of Southampton, the Royal National Lifeboat Institution (RNLI), CIPRB in Bangladesh and Design Without Borders in Uganda.  It funded by the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) through its Research and Innovation for Global Health Transformation programme. For more information, visit the NIHR website.

As we are reaching the end of Open Access Week is worth highlighting that this paper is fully Open Access, and hence freely available in both Nepal and Bangladesh!

Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen

Centre for Midwifery & Women’s Health

Reference:

1. Hossain, M. S., Pant, P. R., van Teijlingen, E., Sedain, B., & Rahman, A. (2024). Drowning Prevention should be a Public Health Issue in Nepal. International Journal of Social Sciences and Management, 11(4): 83–87.