The Centre for Medical Ethics and Law (CMEL) plays a leading role in equipping the country's health care practitioners and researchers for the ethical, social and clinical challenges they face during their careers.

Prof Keymanthri Moodley, director of the Centre, has always been the driving force behind the Centre, identifying a gap in bioethics training at a time when few other South African academics understood its relevance. Bioethics includes not only the philosophical study of the ethics of medicine but also such areas as medical law, medical sociology, health politics and health economics.

Since its inception in 2003, Moodley has established a dynamic facility that offers not only undergraduate and postgraduate training in bioethics and law but also empirical research into bioethical issues as well as consultancy services to hospitals.

Over the years, the Centre has proven that its services are on par with the very best in the world. In 2011, for example, the Centre was awarded a capacity development grant from the prestigious Fogarty International Centre of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in the United States to develop the Advancing Research Ethics in Southern Africa training programme – in collaboration with the University of North Carolina.

As part of the programme, the Centre offered a postgraduate diploma in health research ethics and graduated 40 mid-career professionals from 10 African countries over five years.

Another noteworthy achievement was when, in April 2015, the Centre became a member of the Global Network of Collaborating Centres for Bioethics – a designation awarded by the World Health Organisation (WHO) to only 10 academic centres dedicated to the ethics of public health and research from around the world.

The Centre became the first centre on the African continent to be awarded this privilege. The CMEL recently launched a project aimed at implementing a process for involving participants in the governance of a genomic biobank at Tygerberg Hospital. Educational materials were developed for potential participants, explaining why genetic research is important, how a genomic biobank is used, and how it will benefit South Africans in future.

The Centre also received a five-year NIH grant to develop a historically grounded theoretical and ethical framework around HIV cure research – once again collaborating with the University of North Carolina.

The CMEL has already proven its enormous value within the country's unique clinical, social and ethical context, and is set to become even more instrumental in shaping health care practices in future. Recently, the Centre started applying indigenous African philosophies and values to bioethical issues.

*The article appears in the latest edition of the Stellenbosch University Research Publication. Click here to read more.

Photograph: Stock image - Pixabay

​