Page 86 - A Widening Idea of Health and Health Research - The South African Medical Research Council from Creation to COVID

Positively into the New South Africa: The MRC, 1995–2012

MRC’s pioneering Telemedicine Platform: Ms Jill Fortuin of the Platform explains
how to use the telemedicine equipment, April 2007. Her MSc thesis was in the field of
e-healthcare and telemedicine and on the role and impact of telemedicine on the Grabouw
Community Health Centre.

branch of the international Cochrane Collaboration specialized, unsurprisingly, in
assessing treatments for diseases with a high incidence in Africa like HIV/AIDS and
TB. Within a short time, the number of scientists and clinicians contributing such
reviews from across the continent rose sharply – by 2012 they numbered 450 – turning
the centre into an active source of well-informed peer reviews of many new treatments,
a status demonstrated in its appointment by the African Vaccine Regulatory Forum of
the WHO’s African Regional Office as the home for the Pan African Clinical Trials
Registry and by the Department of Health as the host of the equivalent South African
National Clinical Trials Register. In addition it served as the manager of the South
African Guidelines Excellence Project to develop the best clinical practice for primary
care across the country. Its systematic reviews were central to practitioners and policy-
makers alike, explained a leading clinical pharmacologist, Professor Gary Maartens,
enabling the centre to perform ‘a critical training role in evidence-based medicine that
serves the whole continent’. 125

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