EDGE in South Africa 

EDGE was implemented at the University of Cape Town (UCT) Clinical Research Centre in South Africa in 2018, following a successful 6-month pilot of the system. UCT initially came across EDGE ‘accidentally’ when CIRU Director Professor James Batchelor mentioned it whilst visiting a past colleague and the Research Centre’s previous Director, Dr Delva Shamley. Since then, there was no backing out and they had to have EDGE! Annemie Stewart is the Operations Manager and South Africa’s EDGE Regional Lead and her team have been working on transitioning from spreadsheet trial trackers in Excel to EDGE. As of September 2023, UCT have 43 active trials and trial sites across the African continent under one single system, EDGE, for the first time. They currently have 420 EDGE active users and 24 projects in set up. The UCT Lung Institute group are working to develop their use of EDGE, providing support to an established team of data capture staff, and interacting with field Nurses and Senior Researchers across the continent. The team will be using their newly developed EDGE processes for their Tuberculosis study opening in the Winter of 2023/24 in South Africa, Zanzibar, and Zimbabwe.