Dos and don'ts for mHealth-based clinical support among clinicians in South Africa: Results from a 1-day workshop.

Digital technologies continue to penetrate the South African (SA) healthcare sector at an increasing rate. Clinician-to-clinician diagnostic and management assistance through mHealth is expanding rapidly, reducing professional isolation and unnecessary referrals, and promoting better patient outcomes and more equitable healthcare systems. However, the widespread uptake of mHealth use raises ethical concerns around patient autonomy and safety, and guidance for healthcare workers around the ethical use of mHealth is needed. This article presents the results of a multi-stakeholder workshop at which the 'dos and don'ts' pertaining to mHealth ethics in the SA context were formulated and aligned to seven basic recommendations derived from the literature and previous multi-stakeholder, multi-country meetings.

Barriers to clinical research in Africa: a quantitative and qualitative survey of clinical researchers in 27 African countries.

BACKGROUND: There is a need for high quality research to improve perioperative patient care in Africa. The aim of this study was to understand the particular barriers to clinical research in this environment. METHODS: We conducted an electronic survey of African Surgical Outcomes Study (ASOS) investigators, including 29 quantitative Likert scale questions and eight qualitative questions with subsequent thematic analysis. Protocol compliant and non-compliant countries were compared according to WHO statistics for research and development, health workforce data, and world internet statistics. RESULTS: Responses were received from 134/418 of invited researchers in 24/25 (96%) of participating countries, and three non-participating countries. Barriers included lack of a dedicated research team (47.7%), reliable internet access (32.6%), staff skilled in research (31.8%), and team commitment (23.8%). Protocol compliant countries had significantly more physicians per 1000 population (4 vs 0.9, P<0.01), internet penetration (38% vs 28%, P=0.01) and published clinical trials (1461 vs 208, P<0.01) compared with non-compliant countries. Facilitators of research included establishing a research culture (86.9%), simple data collection tools (80%), and ASOS team interaction (77.9%). Most participants are interested in future research (93.8%). Qualitative data reiterated human resource, financial resource, and regulatory barriers. However, the desire to contribute to an African collaboration producing relevant data to improve patient outcomes was expressed strongly by ASOS investigators. CONCLUSIONS: Barriers to successful participation in ASOS related to resource limitations and not motivation of the clinician investigators. Practical solutions to individual barriers may increase the success of multi-centre perioperative research in Africa.