Image: South African Medical Research Council
SAMRC’s new president calls for “much broader approach” to funding in first public address
The new head of the South African Medical Research Council has called for a “much broader approach” in order for the body to get to grips with the determinants of health inequality in the country.
Ntobeko Ntusi, who took up the post on 1 July, made the comment in his first public address since taking charge of the council.
Presenting an overview of South African health trends over the past few decades, he said there were encouraging signs of declining infectious disease rates. But the lingering effects of inequality founded in the country’s racist Apartheid past still coloured all aspects of health provision, he said.
“I think we need to continue to do what we do even better,” Ntusi said. “We need to conduct exceptional, high-quality research to help [the] government plan better and inform policy.”
The council also needs to continue to invest in health sector innovation and in building a pipeline of future research leaders, he added. “But equally important, our research needs to reflect not just on the biological drivers of disease.”
Health determinants
Ntusi said that the council needs to take “a much broader approach to understanding the determinants of health, be they behavioural, psychological, sociocultural or intractable structural challenges like racism and inequality”.
He called the SAMRC the “ideal place” to help the government ask questions around the implementation of its controversial National Health Insurance reform, which was signed into law in May.
The NHI aims to pool all South African health spending—both public and private—into a central pot to pay for health services. Private medical schemes have opposed the plan, which will limit their operations.
“We hope to work much more with [the] government to support activity across all of those domains,” he said.
Ntusi joins the SAMRC from the University of Cape Town, where he served as head of medicine. He is a cardiologist by training with a PhD in cardiology from the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom.
This article originally gave Ntusi’s start date as 1 August, not 1 July. The error has been corrected.