FORMER Health Minister, Professor Isaac Adewole, says that lessons from COVID-19 pandemic have established that ethical and legal issues in health research and practice are determinants of health that can be overlooked.
Professor Adewole disclosed this in his welcome address at the late Emeritus Professor Akinkugbe Memorial Symposium and the 63rd Health Week of the Alexander Brown Hall at the University College Hospital, Ibadan.
Adewole, who was represented by Professor Mayowa Owolabi, a former dean of the Faculty of Clinical Sciences at the University of Ibadan, said beyond risk factors for health that are now better understood, ethical and legal issues have become more important in determining how to deliver maximum health to the maximum number of people across the world.
The former minister said that causality for health and wellbeing, including political, legal, ethical, anthropological and socioeconomic determinants of health and well-being, are all important and need to be understood in a bid to ensure better health for everybody.
He said, “Facilitating factors for health are becoming better understood. Beyond the clinical factors, there are social determinants of health and diseases. We have political, legal, ethical, anthropological and socioeconomic determinants of health and wellbeing. And it is important to understand this framework.
“Among all of them, ethics seems to be the most important because ethics determines how we can deliver maximum health to the maximum number of people across the globe.
“Ethics determines how industries behave; it determines how the political, legal and other systems work; so, we need to get ethics right in health research and practice. So, I applaud the organizers of this symposium for making it the theme for the celebration of the late Emeritus Professor Akinkugbe, a doyen of medicine.”
The keynote speaker at the occasion, Major General (Prof) Shina Ogunbiyi, who spoke on the sub-theme ‘Historical Context and Future Prospect: The Life of a Brownite in the 80s’, said medicine is dynamic and Nigerian doctors should latch on technology and Artificial Intelligence to remain relevant in different specialties of medicine.
“Technology and Artificial Intelligence is going to transform how we practise medicine, including research. Things keep changing and medicine is not static, it is up to us in this clime to follow suit,” he said.
Professor Ademola Ajuwon of the Department of Health Promotion and Education, University of Ibadan, said health research requires being honest and humble; respecting the rights of all members of the community that participate in the research, and all accomplished researchers need to uphold ethics in their work.
Professor Afolarin Malomo, another panelist and consultant neurosurgeon, in a remark said health care regularly deals with issues around ethics as it is all about a distinction between what is considered right or wrong at a given time in a given culture.
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