Hillbrow | Atteridgeville | Melusi

The health and demographic surveillance national research infrastructure will be a distributed platform of HDSS nodes. Our argument is that to try and incorporate at least some of Gauteng’s urban complexity, the Gauteng node should be distributed across a manageable number of sites, as it slots into the national system. To quote SAPRIN, “The HDSS is a standardised, field-based information system and research platform … that will … routinely and continuously collect and assess … vital events, e.g. births and deaths (by cause), residence status and migration, household dynamics, socio-economic status, disease monitoring, labour and employment status, education status and social protection.” From the White Paper, through the Roadmap to the SAPRIN call for applications, the intention seems clearly to embed an understanding of vital events and statistics in an understanding of broader socio-economic, demographic and other social processes. Multidisciplinarity is often very challenging to realise after the fact, such as where a node is designed, set up and run purely as a health intervention. The gist of this proposal is that we are building multidisciplinarity into the design with the explicit intention of seeking to capture complexity via multi- and/or transdisciplinary teams working at nodal level.

In the work of all partners in this proposal, data are not an end in themselves, nor are academic outputs, important as they are. The work all partners do is aimed ‘upwards’ at policy-makers, to try and provide evidence to better inform, evaluate or evolve policy. This is as true of the Family Medicine Unit at UP as of WHRI in Hillbrow, the largest testing centre in the southern hemisphere.

Our real focus is ‘downwards’, to the communities with which we work, and by extension, to similar communities elsewhere. Whether this is by testing vaccines or the development of community oriented primary care, the focus remains on serving the needs of poorer communities, to improve their health status. They remain the real focus and partner in this endeavour.