Page 113 - A Widening Idea of Health and Health Research - The South African Medical Research Council from Creation to COVID

A Widening Idea of Health: The SAMRC from Creation to Covid

Of the new public health research units, one, the Risk and Resilience in Mental
Disorders Research Unit, at UCT and Stellenbosch was really a continuation under
a fresh name of Professor Dan Stein’s 20-year-old Anxiety and Stress Disorders
Research Unit, but now with an express brief to make it more inclusive by adding
neuropsychiatric disorders among Africans to its investigations.
Another public health-orientated unit, the Health Services to Systems Research
Unit at UWC, sought to address the growing shortcomings that were becoming
apparent in the new South Africa’s emerging health system, such as stock-outs
of essential drugs, duplicated health services, and the bypassing of the standard
consultation procedures in the primary health-care system. As its director, Professor
Helen Schneider, confirmed, ‘Strengthening governance is recognised as a central
priority in South Africa’s health system, and is an ongoing focus of our work.’
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A research unit at Witwatersrand University, the Centre for Health Economics
and Decision Science, tackled a different aspect of problems in the country’s health
system, namely poorly informed decision-making which had a detrimental impact on
health. For instance, its modelling of the high cost to health of the unrestrained intake
of salt and of sugary drinks persuaded the Government to introduce South Africa’s
first health promotion levy in 2018. By the Centre’s calculation, a tax just on sugar-
sweetened beverages would save R5 billion in health-care costs over twenty years,
more than justifying the Centre’s tag, ‘Priceless’ (Priority Cost Effective Lessons for
Systems Strengthening).
Bitterer fare formed the research fields of two other new extramural research units,
the Microbial Water Quality Monitoring Unit at Fort Hare – the first at that university
– and the Masculinity and Health Research Unit at UNISA. The former focused on
improving sanitation and water quality in the rural Eastern Cape, in particular by
training water scientists in key areas like securing a safe water supply, waste-water
management and the prevention of waterborne diseases.
Equally topical in its focus, the Masculinity and Health Research Unit sought to
understand how and why masculinity per se impacted on males’ health and especially
to explore the disproportionate involvement of men in perpetrating and suffering
violence and injury. This, Professor Kopano Ratele, the first African man to head an
extramural MRC unit, believed, stemmed from particular notions of masculinity in a
highly unequal society in which ‘violence becomes a socially sanctioned way for men
to demonstrate their power over women and other men’. Such a socio-psychological
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answer to these questions was extended in 2020 by the unit’s incorporation of the
existing Violence, Injury and Peace Research Unit at UNISA, which added to this
approach its emphasis on community engagement and qualitative research. However,

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