First Thing First-Capacity Building in Forensic Medicine

The first step to assuring some standards of practice in forensic medicine is to build human capacity. One important point to quickly make is that local content is crucial to maintaining a standard of practice that is both acceptable and relevant to the people. While it may be inevitable to derived support and principles from foreign institutions and systems that work (in their environment), it must be emphasized that any service that will be rendered to any community in Africa must appreciate the peculiarities of our people, norms and ethos. A common mistake that professionals make, especially those trained in foreign institutions, is to adopt this one fits all approach. A training programme should be designed that takes into cognizance practical aspects of the realities in our communities. We may not suddenly have infrastructural overhaul or built up overnight but we can make do with some existing infrastructure and improve upon it with time. Often, we give up easily in frustration in an attempt to build an institution similar to a foreign one we know of, and of course meet a brick wall in funding and other resources. Our focus should be on maintaining  principles of practice; quality of personnel and facilities may differ but principles apply in all settings. So, we need to start teaching principles of practice and how they apply to our communities. In the run long, if we stay the course, we'll get to that "preeminent" stage but more importantly, the future generation must be able to track the principles upon which we've built any existing institution and practice.