Future vision Bioethics & Engagement
We provide support to MORU’s central objective, to improve the health of people living in the resource-poor tropics. We do this by engaging our stakeholders and conducting ethics research to ensure that our research is ethical and trustworthy, and that its impact is maximized.
Data sharing
Bioethics & Engagement will continue to work on ethical issues around data sharing. There is a pressing need to ensure that data sharing does not exacerbate existing inequalities between higher and lower income settings. Our plans include tracking shared datasets, documenting the impact of data sharing, and identifying the infrastructure and processes required to promote data sharing for all research. We will conduct social science research to understand key stakeholders’ experiences and barriers to data sharing, and develop a data sharing policy course.
Vulnerabilities in research
Research ethics guidelines have evolved to protect vulnerable groups such as children, pregnant women and migrants from taking part in research. Although these guidelines are well-meaning, they have resulted in a lack of research in these populations, making them even more vulnerable primarily due to the lack of evidence-based medical care. We continue to work on characterising these vulnerabilities and ways of mitigating them.
Community/public engagement research
Very little has been published on the evaluation of community engagement. How do we know if our community engagement work has achieved what it set out to achieve? We will continue to conduct research on community engagement alongside MORU scientific research.
Community/Public engagement activities
We will expand our portfolio of public engagement activities by building on the success of the projects that worked well, expanding our activities to cover new disease areas such as tuberculosis, and piloting new engagement strategies.
Ethics and antimicrobial resistance (AMR)
We have been funded to create a social science/AMR network. This network is the starting point to develop social science/ethics projects related to AMR.