Dr Nachiket Mor joins the board of Sukoon Healthcare

New Delhi: Sukoon Healthcare, India’s leading inpatient and outpatient psychiatric facility, has inducted Dr Nachiket Mor as an Independent Director on its board.

Dr Nachiket Mor is leader in health systems design & policy and recently supported the Govt of Meghalaya as part of its Mental Health Policy Drafting Sub-committee. He is also currently a Commissioner on the Lancet Citizen’s Commission on Reimagining India’s Health System. He was previously the India Country Director for Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and has also served as a member of the Planning Commission’s High-Level Expert Group on Universal Healthcare.  In his earlier avatar, Dr Mor was on the Board of directors of the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) and is widely credited with leading the financial inclusion movement in India.

Highlighting the urgent need for in-patient psychiatric care infrastructure in India, Dr. Nachiket Mor, Board Director, Sukoon, said, “While the incidence or population impacted by severe mental health disorders could be considered low – 0.3% for schizophrenia and 0.6% for bipolar disorder – the burden of the disease is quite high, further exacerbated by the inheritability of these conditions.” Per the Lancet’s 2019 estimations, the burden of mental health disease is larger than respiratory disease, cancer or diabetes and yet India has only around 10,000 clinical psychiatrists treating these disorders. He added that, “Both in-community & hospital care are required to holistically treat severe mental disorders”

Dr Nachiket emphasized that this is an important area to be addressed by the private sector noting that the problem cannot be solved by public resources alone. He said, “Sukoon is providing a safe space for the treatment of patients as well as supporting them and their family with outpatient services to ensure consistency across the continuum of care. I look forward to helping them scale this model across cities.”

Welcoming Dr. Nachiket Mor on board, Saleem Asaria, Executive Chairman, Sukoon said, “We are delighted to have Nachiket’s support in solving the complex and urgent problem of enabling access to high-quality psychiatric healthcare in India.  His guidance will help shape our strategy as we build India’s first and largest therapeutic behavioural health platform.”