SA is full of talented, gifted and knowledgeable people, but more needs to be done to translate that capacity into goods and services on the ground that will help the ordinary people of the country, says science and technology minister Mosibudi Mangena.
"We are seeing a bit of that, but not enough. We still need to do a lot more," he said after a demonstration of a telemedicine project at the Grabouw Health Centre yesterday.
The Department of Science and Technology's Innovation Fund has awarded over R6 million to the Medical Research Council's (MRC's) national telemedicine project since its inception in 2004.
The project is conducting several pilots to develop ICT support for healthcare in the country. Telemedicine workstations are being used to link clinics in outlying areas to hospitals in urban areas to get online guidance and diagnoses in real-time.
The MRC's Dr Moretlo Molefi demonstrated a telemedicine workstation developed in collaboration with the University of Stellenbosch, various government departments and public, as well as private sector companies.
She said the locally developed workstations addressed the shortcomings of solutions developed overseas in terms of robustness, user-friendliness, workflow integration and remote maintenance.
Mangena said it was "heart-warming" to see how tax money was being used to deliver skills and technology to improve healthcare in rural and other outlying areas of the country and that he was "very impressed".
However, Mangena said there had to be a direct relationship between research and tangible outcomes for the benefit of the country.
"People tend to be happy with merely publishing the results of research, but we would like to see a jump towards patenting to develop and protect local intellectual property for the benefit of everyone," he said.
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