Research Areas

Department Research Areas

• Global Health Ethics

Sassy Molyneux is a Wellcome Research Fellow carrying out a research project entitled, 'Strengthening Community Accountability in Biomedical Research and Health Delivery'. Sassy is employed by Oxford University through the Ethox Centre and the Nuffield Department of Medicine Centre for Tropical Medicine, and has been working as part of the KEMRI-Wellcome Trust Research Programme in Kilifi, Kenya, since 1994.  She currently co-leads the Social and Behavioural research (SBR) group in Kilifi. 

Sassy's research has focused on two main areas: the interface between health systems and households; and the interface between health researchers and communities.  Her current main focus is on community accountability; producing new thinking, evidence and recommendations around strengthening community involvement in biomedical research and health delivery in sub-Saharan Africa.  Despite the prominence of community involvement in policy and practice in this part of the world, there is little recent published experience, particularly regarding community involvement in biomedical research. Sassy's work involves literature reviewing and empirical work, including a series of case studies exploring the implementation and impact of community accountability for different biomedical studies and health delivery activities. The work is aimed at developing and testing a draft theoretical framework, and at feeding into local and international policy and practice. 

Sassy's previous work looking specifically at the interface between health researchers and communities has included looking at community perceptions and understanding of the KEMRI-Wellcome Trust Collaborative Research Programme, and more specifically at informed consent procedures. This work contributed to the development and introduction of a large scale communication strategy. The communication strategy is on-going, and includes significant community engagement activities and action research which.  Sassy initiated and sits on a sub-committee of the KEMRI-Wellcome Trust Scientific Coordination Committee:  the consent and communication committee.  Strengthening social science capacity in the East Africa is a priority concern of SBR; and is built into all activities of the group.  Social science capacity strengthening initiatives draw on and feed into a large scale initiative for the wider programme.