HealthLink: SatelLife and HealthNet in South Africa
| Pages | 293-298 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/eb045378 |
| Date | 01 April 1995 |
| Published date | 01 April 1995 |
| Author | Glenda Myers,Thokozile Nkabinde,Duane Blaauw |
| Subject Matter | Information & knowledge management,Library & information science |
Article
HealthLink: SatelLife and HealthNet
in South Africa
Glenda Myers
Witwatersrand Medical
Library,
7
York
Road,
Parktown,
Johannesburg,
2193 South Africa
E-mail:
myers@minerva. med. wits. ac. za
Thokozile Nkabinde
Health Systems
Trust,
504 General
Building,
Cnr.
Smith & Field
Streets,
Durban,
4001 South Africa
Duane Blaauw
National
Manager,
HealthLink,
Witwatersrand Medical
School,
7
York
Road,
Parktown,
Johannesburg,
2193 South Africa
Abstract: SatelLife
is
an international not-for-profit
organisation,
which began
as an initiative of
the
group known as International Physicians for
the
Prevention
of Nuclear War
(IPPNW),
recipient of the
1985
Nobel Peace
Prize.
Based in
Cambridge, Massachusetts, SatelLife aims to promote the use of micro-satellite
technology to serve the health communication and information needs of countries
in the developing world SatelLife administers HealthNet, which
uses
a
'store
and
forward'
satellite in a pole-to-pole
orbit,
HealthSat,
in order to facilitate the
transmission of messages and information between
the
ground stations over
which it passes. The system is relatively cheap to install and is
independent
of the
notoriously unreliable communications infrastructures of Third World countries,
relying as it does on radio rather than telephone links between each ground
station and the
satellite.
HealthNet
is
specifically designed to facilitate the
exchange of information among health professionals in the developing world and
to link them with their colleagues
in
First World countries. Essentially an
e-mail
system,
HealthNet has been installed
in
several northern African countries as well
as
Cuba,
However, HealthNet
is
also used to facilitate the distribution of an
electronic newsletter among African medical librarians.
Although South Africa
is
technologically far more advanced than
the
rest of
Africa,
problems still arise in terms of the transmission of essential health
statistics and data that
is
now required for demographic and healthcare planning
in terms of the ANC
's
new health policy. Accordingly, a pilot study linking three
of the more under-developed regions in South Africa has recently been
established under the coordination of a national
manager.
In South Africa, the
system will be known as
HealthLink,
as HealthNet already exists as a trademark
in this
country.
This paper aims to describe the background leading to the
establishment of
HealthLink,
as well as its current status in the improvement of
electronic healthcare information delivery
in
South Africa
1.
Introduction
Healthcare systems in South Africa are
predominantly urban, hospital-based
and curative. This model is proving
hopelessly inadequate to cope with the
needs of the majority of South Afri-
cans,
and leaves rural South Africa
with little or no
access to
basic primary
healthcare (Robbins 1995). Health in-
formation systems are still more rudi-
mentary and even in the urban
'hi-tech' academic
hospitals,
the colla-
tion and dissemination of basic health-
care data on a national basis, such as
morbidity and mortality statistics, has
only just been recognised by the State
as
a
priority for quality health informa-
tion management (African National
Congress 1994).
Clearly much remains to be done to
redistribute funding and determine
priorities, but little has been suggested
in terms of health information delivery
as a means of redressing past imbal-
ances.
Since most of the medical infor-
mation centres in South Africa are
clustered around urban (often aca-
demic or research) libraries, and since
the building of new libraries in rural
areas is unlikely to take precedence
over the building of houses, schools
and clinics, the relevance of electronic
health information distribution is clear
to those working in this field.
2.
SatelLife
SatelLife was one of the first formal
organisations, worldwide, to recog-
nise the importance of electronic tech-
nology in improving health
information systems
in
countries in the
developing world.
SatelLife was established in 1989
as an initiative of the International
Physicians for the Prevention of Nu-
clear War
(IPPNW),
which realised as
East-West tensions diminished that
the gap between the information rich
of the northern hemisphere and the in-
formation poor of the south was wid-
ening exponentially (SatelLife 1993).
The Electronic Library, Vol. 13, No. 4, August 1995 293
To continue reading
Request your trial