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The prevalence of physical inactivity in India is estimated to be at 34%, the highest among South Asian nations. Interventions, such as outdoor gymnasiums/gyms, aiming to promote physical activity, are becoming popular worldwide, including in India. This paper presents the first empirical evidence on outdoor gyms in India from a qualitative perspective. Semi-structured, in-depth interviews of 56 outdoor gym stakeholders—40 users, 10 non-users, 4 healthcare providers and 2 outdoor gym implementing municipality authorities were conducted in the National Capital Region of India. The interviews were transcribed and analyzed through the Framework Method. The qualitative findings present the perceived benefits, barriers/challenges to using and provide insights for further improving and scaling up outdoor gyms in India. Health enhancement in the form of improved general fitness, body weight control and diversification of physical exercise routines, social connectivity, easy accessibility, affordability, green outdoor surroundings, and a place of intrigue and attraction in respective parks were the major reported benefits of outdoor gyms. Low gym equipment to user ratio was one of the major challenges to gym use across the user group. Healthcare providers and non-users were majorly concerned about the potentially incorrect and unsupervised use of outdoor gym equipment. Major suggestions for improvement were increasing the number of equipment installed, regular equipment maintenance, and the presence of an on-site physical exercise trainer. Outdoor gymnasiums present as a viable option for promoting physical activity and should be scaled up systematically to improve the health of the populations across India and other similar nations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Health promotion has long recognized the ecological determinants of health, underscoring the interconnections between planetary health, economic systems and human health. Despite calls for synergy across them, these domains are governed by fundamentally divergent paradigms leading to unaddressed conceptual and institutional gaps. Sustainability, meanwhile, is reduced to personal responsibility and behaviour change. This qualitative research explores ecological determinants through a focus on sustainable consumption in the under-researched context of the global south where rapid modernization has profoundly impacted the natural environment. The article uses the theoretical framework of 'practice'—namely, the social routines, values, conventions and norms that drive consumption—to critically examine everyday household sustainable consumption in India's southern state of Kerala. The findings show that in most households, sustainability is a health promotion practice. People practice sustainability fundamentally for its beneficial health outcomes. However, the institutional structures set up in favour of economic development continue to dominate society and is the paradigm that contextualizes everyday social life for consumers. The findings suggest that the practice of sustainable consumption is complex and caught in the space that is neither 'upstream' or 'downstream'; instead, the focus on the 'mid-stream' reveals complex calculations that go into everyday negotiation of healthy living. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While employing a phenomenological perspective, the present study aimed to explore the varied experiences of transgender individuals in Kashmir, concerning their health-seeking behavior, and the constraints they face while accessing healthcare resources on a day-to-day basis in their life world. Participants were recruited through the purposive and snowball sampling strategies and the sufficiency of sample size was determined by data saturation. Data were collected using face-to-face in-depth interviews and analyzed through Colaizzi's procedure of extracting recurrent themes and their interwoven relationships in qualitative research. Three main themes of awareness and the preferences for healthcare, gender identity and persistent stigmatization in care settings, and intra-community support and the resultant caregiving were prominent. Results of the study revealed that the transgender individuals in Kashmir experience inappropriate health-seeking behaviour primarily due to their unawareness regarding health, diseases and public healthcare programs/schemes, financial constraints, social exclusion, improper support and social stigma. They often prefer treating their health issues, mostly through local pharmacies or patent medicine vendors (PMVs), instead of visiting the medical professionals in the organized sector. Moreover, in many instances, they were also found to delay their decisions to seek care or simply decided to remain far from any medical intervention. As a result, the transgender individuals in Kashmir usually experience underutilization of formal healthcare services, which undermines their right to proper health and well-being. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Affordances offered by new media platforms are perceived as revolutionary instruments for removing the inequities of access to health promotion and communication. However, the production and dissemination of health promotional material on digital platforms does not necessarily translate into uniform access across diverse demographics. This article addresses the lacuna when it comes to analyzing Health Promotion initiatives in India, with a specific focus on the governmental publicity carried out on social media during the four phases of COVID-19 national lockdown between 24 March and 31 May 2020. Our intervention examines how governmental social media health promotion in India played a key role in shaping the 'outbreak narrative' during the lockdown across different levels of social and economic privilege. Through a combination of quantitative data analysis and qualitative interview methods, this article analyzes the circulation and impact of official publicity in online and offline spaces, during the COVID-19 lockdown in India. Resultant findings allow for a comprehensive assessment of whether such publicity contributed to democratized citizen science discourses: enabling social protection measures for vulnerable majorities or potentially reified the existing privileges of the economically and socially affluent minority. We find that health promotion campaigns during a pandemic must focus on reaching the widest possible audience in the most efficient manner. Specifically, in the Indian context, health promotion through mass-media like Television and Radio, and participatory media platforms needed to be implemented in tandem with new media platforms, to achieve required engagement with vulnerable communities on key health issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mental health problems are recognized as a leading cause of disability and have seen increased allocations of resources and services globally. There is a growing call for solutions supporting global mental health and recovery to be locally relevant and built on the knowledge and skills of people with mental health problems, particularly in low-income countries. Set in Dehradun district, North India, this study aimed to describe first, the process of co-production of a visual tool to support recovery for people affected by psycho-social disability; second, the key outputs developed and third, critical reflection on the process and outputs. The developmental process consisted of participatory action research and qualitative methods conducted by a team of action researchers and an experts by experience (EBE) group of community members. The team generated eight domains for recovery under three meta-domains of normalcy, belonging and contributing and the ensuing recovery tool developed pictures of activities for each domain. Challenges to using a participatory and emancipatory process were addressed by working with a mentor experienced in participatory methods, and by allocating time to concurrent critical reflection on power relationships. Findings underline the important contribution of an EBE group demonstrating their sophisticated and locally valid constructions of recovery and the need for an honest and critically reflective process in all co-productive initiatives. This study generated local conversations around recovery that helped knowledge flow from bottom-to-top and proposes that the grass-root experiences of participants in a disadvantaged environment are needed for meaningful social and health policy responses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tobacco consumption in multiple forms presents an emerging, significant and growing threat to the health of Indian adolescents, especially those from low socio-economic communities. Research in two phases was undertaken among economically disadvantaged adolescents in two urban slums of Delhi. In phase I, qualitative research methods such as focus group discussions and in-depth interviews were used to explore and understand the determinants influencing tobacco use among these adolescents. Prevalence of tobacco use was higher among boys than girls. Adolescents reported using tobacco in multiple forms, chewing tobacco being the most popular. Peer pressure, easy availability and affordability were important reasons associated with tobacco initiation and continued use. Though they had some knowledge about the harmful effects of tobacco, this was not sufficient to motivate them to abstain or quit. The community-based intervention model developed on the basis of the results of phase I was evaluated in phase II in a demonstration study with two slum communities. One was treated as the intervention and the other as control. A significant difference in current use of tobacco was observed between the study groups (p = 0.048), with the intervention group showing a reduction in use, compared with an increase in use among the control group. Post-intervention, the intervention group reported significantly lower fresh uptake (0.3%) of tobacco use compared with the control group (1.7%). No significant change was found for quit rate (p = 0.282) in the two groups. Community-based interventions can be effective in preventing adolescents from initiating tobacco use in a low-resource setting such as India. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]