Falak Madhani
Implementation Scientist
Falak Madhani is a public health practitioner with 15 years of experience in strategy and design of health programs and health workforce development in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Syria, Egypt, and East Africa.
Between 2016-2019, Falak led a national tuberculosis project in Pakistan that scaled up evidence-based case finding interventions and health system strengthening to offer patients a continuum of care. Falak’s team demonstrated that artificial intelligence-based chest x-ray screening followed by point-of-care bacteriological testing can be scaled up for active case finding of TB patients in urban and rural settings in Pakistan.
Between 2020-2023, Falak served as Head of Programmes and Research at Aga Khan Health Service, Pakistan (AKHS,P). AKHS,P is a pioneer in primary care and over the course of 35 years has made demonstrable impact on MNCH indicators in Northern Pakistan by applying and scaling up evidence-based interventions. With over 115 primary and secondary health facilities, AKHS,P is working towards responding to the evolving needs of the population and in particular prevention and early identification of non-communicable diseases.
At AKHS,P, Falak led the introduction and scale up of a village-based growth monitoring program for young children and pregnant women to tackle stunting and wasting, and programs for prevention and early identification of women’s cancers (cervical and breast cancer), as well as rights-based programs for family planning and competency building of health providers across the region. She also worked on new staffing models to expand primary care beyond MNCH to take a life course approach.
In her role at AKHS,P Falak established close collaboration with AKU Brain and Mind Institute (AKU BMI) to lead the establishment of a stepped care model for mental health services in Gilgit-Baltistan and Chitral – for a catchment population of about 100,000 people. She is overseeing the adoption of a combination of evidence-based interventions (EBI) such as the WHO Mental Health Gap Action Program and the Thinking Healthy Program into a systematic stepped care model in the region. Her work includes working with partners to adapt the Thinking Healthy Program to group settings and for mothers and fathers of young children. She is the PI on a study aimed at identifying barriers and facilitators to the adoption of EBIs into the health system while also measuring impact on key patient outcomes.
Falak holds an MSc Public Health in Developing Countries (now called the Public Health for Development program) from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and a liberal arts degree from Bennington College, in Vermont, USA.
Falak brings her rich health systems experience to her new role with AKU-BMI to lead the establishment of the BMI Living Labs framework in Northern Pakistan and strengthen the collaboration between BMI and health systems in the region, in particular the AKHS,P health system, for improved brain and mind research and programme development.
