Mekha Ann Mathew graduated with a Bachelor’s in Dental Surgery (BDS) in 2016, while also being a Rotaract member and helping in setting up free health camps in rural India.

After the successful completion of Internship, she took up master’s in Public Health in University College Cork, Ireland. Getting acquainted with quantitative analysis, SPSS, Epidemiology and Biostatistics, she chose “Oral health literacy amongst third level students in Cork” as the key area of focus for her master’s thesis. During the duration of the course, she took up an Internship with Cork Sports Partnership, and concentrated on Health Promotion.

Subsequently, she began working on a HRB funded project with Hospital In-Patient (HIPE) data, regarding Activity based funding (ABF) amongst the hospitals groups of Ireland in 2018 and contributed significantly to setting up of the conference “Social Determinants of Health 2020” as a medium of dissemination for the key findings. The scope of the project expanded to include area level deprivation in relation to small areas and Pobal HP index and length of stay and diagnosis related categories. The results will be further distributed as a report for policy changes with the stakeholders, Health Services Executive (HSE), Health Pricing Office (HPO), Healthy Ireland, Hospital Groups Ireland and University of Limerick.

Currently, she is working as a HealthPros fellow, Early Stage Researcher, based in Nuffield department of health, University of Oxford, analysing the Royal College of General Practitioners (RCGP) Research and Surveillance Centre’s (RSC) data with R. Through her work, she intends to halt the “book to shelf” phenomenon common in academics and make relevant real-life changes with the right interventions in policy and practise.