Ranjana Srivastava is a medical oncologist and writer based in Melbourne at Southern Health, one of Australia’s largest public hospital networks.
Ranjana spent the early part of her life in the Indian state of Bihar, before receiving a global education in the United Kingdom, United States and Australia. During her schooling she was nominated to the National Honour Society and the Golden Key Honour Society.
Ranjana graduated in 1997 from Monash University with a first class honours degree in Medicine. Among other awards she received the Faculty Prize for Psychiatry. She subsequently trained at various public hospitals in Melbourne in internal medicine before entering medical oncology training in 2002.
In 2004, Ranjana won the W.G.Walker Alumni Award, given to the highest-ranked postgraduate recipient of the Fulbright Award. She used her Fulbright scholarship to complete a fellowship in medical ethics and communication at the MacLean Center for Clinical Medical Ethics at the University of Chicago. Ranjana was a member of the hospital ethics consultation team during this time. Ranjana was successfully admitted to the Royal Australasian College of Physicians in 2005 as a medical oncologist. In the same year, she was appointed to Southern Health, where she works as a general physician and medical oncologist.
Ranjana was awarded a place in the Williamson Community Leadership Program for 2011, designed to nurture emerging leaders from a broad section of the community.
She is also associated with the Monash University Faculty of Medicine, Nursing and Health Sciences, where she occasionally lectures and is a member of the selection committee. Ranjana is actively involved with the education of junior doctors and international medical graduates.
Ranjana has served as a medical volunteer on various occasions. Whilst in medical training, she twice volunteered with Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity in Calcutta, India, where she provided street-based basic medical care.
In Melbourne, she worked with refugees at the Asylum Seeker Resource Center and helped them negotiate community and hospital-based care at a time when they were granted minimal access to these services.
In the aftermath of the devastating 2004 tsunami, Ranjana was appointed by the Commonwealth Services Abroad Program to work on a remote island in the Maldives. While providing basic medical aid and counselling to the afflicted population, Ranjana wrote about her experiences and attracted sufficient funds to buy the island inhabitants their first boat. Local philanthropists helped build the boat as the island’s first community-owned medical transport vehicle, which was used to ferry sick patients to the nearest hospital located on a different island.
Ranjana’s training and volunteering experiences have given her a sound appreciation of issues such as disparities in health care and the moral and ethical challenges of modern medicine. Her interests focus on fostering better communication between patients and health-care providers and improving end of life care.
Ranjana and her husband, also a doctor, live in Melbourne with their three young children.