Local doctors discuss health care ethics with renowned university professors |11 July 2015

For the first time in Seychelles, the Medical and Dental Council (SMDC) has teamed up with the World Medical Association to organise a two-day seminar on health care ethics.

The event is taking place at the Seychelles Institute of Teacher Education (Site) at Mont Fleuri.

Professor Vivienne Nathanson from Durham University, United Kingdom and Professor Amaboo Dhai from the University of Witwatersrand, South Africa are the main facilitators of the seminar and both academics are members of the World Medical Association and world leaders in the field of health care ethics.

Health care ethics, according to various health networks, at its simplest, is a set of moral principles, beliefs and values that guide medical practitioners in making choices about medical care.

“The SMDC noted that we must do more than just registration, more than just receiving complaints about doctors and dentists, more than just being a passive, silent and obscure little health care actor. It is in this line that this seminar has been organised,” said Dr Bernard Valentin, chief medical officer and chairman of the SMDC.

“Ethics is the discipline of morality and our tagline is: For the public, for the profession, for optimal health care. Ethics is the moral compass for members of the health care professions and teach us to remain faithful to the rules and standards of our professions,” Dr Valentin said.

“With the two eminent professors we begin a journey in our knowledge and understanding of the basic concepts of health care ethics. They will help us sharpen our thinking on the difficult issues that we face every day and help us think through some of the difficult care decisions that we have to make. At the end we should help each other to find a straighter, clearer, less foggy professional path,” added Dr Valentin.

After commending all the medical practitioners who closed their business to attend this function, the Minister for Health, Mitcy Larue, said that “your participation in such a seminar is a strong recognition of your personal need to return to the fundamentals of your professions, to build further on the elements that make you who you are, as a professional, as a care-giver, as a health-care worker, a healer”.

“Without strong ethical principles the care practitioner may well end up doing more harm than good and will indeed cease to remain that special professional, that special human being that he or she is imagined to be,” Minister Larue said. “But whether one is in the caring business or not, ethics remains the moral compass that continuously pulls one back-back to the correct professional path, back to truly putting the customer at the centre. Whether in politics or health care, ethics reminds us all that even when decisions are difficult to make, there is still the right and the wrong that we must find,” noted the minister.

She added that she is seeing change happening rapidly in the care environment. “As the Ministry of Health moves forward on its path of modernisation and develops new policies, new strategies and new plans, I see new actors and new ways of doing things emerging. There is also a new wave of unbending commitment to continuous professional development. The Nurses and Midwives Council has already enshrined compulsory continuous professional development as a requirement for renewal of registration for nurses and midwives. The SMDC and the Health Professionals Council are still working at it. All health care professionals must prioritise their continuous professional development and the Ministry of Health will continue to support and facilitate activities of continuous professional development,” she reiterated.

The seminar is part of the programme of continuous professional development of the SMDC, the legal regulator of medical and dental practice in Seychelles.
At a time that the Seychelles health services are brimming with complaints of poor care quality and absence of patient-centred care, it is expected that the seminar will contribute to bringing health care professionals back to the fundamentals of their trade.

Over 75 local doctors, dentists and other health care professionals from the private and public health sectors are attending this event.