Bharat Pankhania

Dr Bharat Pankhania has widespread experience of advising on national communicable disease control action plans at national and international level. As a senior Consultant in Communicable Disease Control,

Dr Pankhania coordinated complex and very sensitive look back exercises, where there had been laboratory errors or hospital exposure of patients to infections, these are major national exercises and very sensitive operations.

Dr Pankhania introduced the use of timely and accurate surveillance date to produce Quarterly Health Protection Reports to local stake holders. A driver for early recognition of infectious disease trends and timely actions.

Dr Pankhania qualified from the Welsh Nation Schools of Medicine, Cardiff, Wales and a trained as a General Practitioner in 1989. Thereafter he did further training in Respiratory Medicine. Having had experience of both Primary and Secondary Care, Dr Pankhania realised that to make a bigger contribution to people`s health, primary prevention of illness was important, thus he trained in Public Health Medicine and thereafter did further training in infectious diseases and Communicable Disease Control. He worked as a Consultant in Communicable Disease Control, for local authorities, the newly created Health Protection Agency and subsequently Public Health England.

Dr Pankhania’s experience includes:
Pandemic Influenza outbreak planning and major plan testing exercises: Development of a web-based surveillance system for recording the first 500 plus cases of a pandemic, to quickly understand the new virus and thus better implement control measures. He was the local Lead for Pandemic Influenza planning at Public Health England and became the reference point for outbreak planning, testing systems and control strategies.

Ebola and SARS: Dr Pankhania was immersed in and contributed to the Ebola and SARS surveillance and control methodologies, specialist screening methods at ports of entry.

Tuberculosis: As lead investigator, Dr Pankhania became an expert in investigating clusters of Tuberculosis and using newly developed tools such as, interferon blood tests for TB, clinical sample Spoligo typing and subsequently Variable Number Tandem repeats (VNTR). Using these new tools the investigating teams are able to identify, with much greater precision, the spread of infection, and identify contacts and cases which were related but otherwise not picked up by standard questionnaires. Dr Pankhania was the lead coordinator for the TB Restricted Fibre Length Polymorphism (RFLP) study.

Dr Pankhania developed protocols for Tuberculosis Investigations and controlling TB outbreaks in schools, hospitals and prisons.

Legionella: Dr Pankhania has led on and was the Legionella lead in his previous job. He investigated complex outbreaks, advised hospitals and hotels and also developed expertise in the health and safety law relating to Legionella, as well as giving evidence in the Coroners court where a hospital was found guilty of neglect.

Other areas of expertise:
Creating tabletop exercises for real time simulation of major events, radiological, biological and environmental disasters.

Outbreak investigations and working with senior doctors at hospitals and regional centres.

Refugee work as Public Health Doctor in India after an earthquake

Investigating Meningococcal infections and diphtheria clusters plus many other notifiable diseases

Teaching, Training, Mentoring. Imperial University, Bristol University, Plymouth University, University of West of England, Public Health England

Dr Pankhania is creative and looks for solutions to common problems, well before it became the norm, he was ahead of the system in creating a secure website for access to the Health Protection on call handbook and any other information needed in an emergency. Similarly, he centralised and created a safer, secure, responsive single point of contact for any out of hours calls with an audit trail too.

Another innovation of Dr Pankhania was the delivery of Chief Medical Officers and other emergency alerts to a wider network with a clear audit trail, this in the days before emails became the norm.

Education commitment
Dr Pankhania is passionate about education and passing on knowledge about how to operate as a good doctor. He is interested in Health Protection / Communicable Disease Control.

He is enthusiastic about primary prevention of illness. A better public health for all. A firm believer and proponent of living in harmony with the environment, incursions into the environment by mankind is leading to emergence of novel infections. Zikha, Ebola, SARS, MERS, Corona outbreaks are all examples of this.

Dr Pankhania has worked in Public Health Medicine for over 25 years, he feels better health is often derived by a better-informed population, able to make their own judgements and decisions. Therefore Education is the main empowering agent for better health.

Teaching, training and mentoring have always been Dr Pankhania’s forte, he has been the training lead for Health Protection at his Public Health England, SW Region. Additionally, he has held honorary teaching positions, for over 15 years, with superb feedback at University of Bristol, Imperial University, University of St Mark and St John, University of West of England.

Dr Pankhania started his new post at University of Exeter Medical School in 2017 and he is head of Public Health Medicine teaching.