Teaching
Convener: Executive Leadership Course in Global Surgery.
I convene on the Executive Leadership Course in Global Surgery that is offered through the UCT Graduate School of Business. This course is a flagship course for the Division of Global Surgery. It was developed in collaboration with the Bertha Centre for Social Innovation and Entrepreneurship; Programme for Global Surgery and Social Change at Harvard University; Global Surgery Foundation, United Nations Training and Research Institute. Other endorsements include Africa CDC and COSECSA.
As part of the course participants does an improvement project within their setting to demonstrate their leadership and implementation skill. Read more about the course here.
Convener: Management and Leadership on MPhil in Emergency Medicine
This course is focused on the first line operational manager in emergency care settings and offers a practical approach. The themes include fundamentals of management, generic functions, leadership, people in the organisation, team performance, supply chain and basic financial principles.
The aim is to develop it into a stand-alone course in future for management and leadership development.
I like being creative in the classroom and introduce people to concepts they might not be exposed to in their daily work. Below pictures are from a Design Thinking workshop during a contact session.
Program convener: Post Graduate Diploma in Emergency Care.
The purpose of this fully online program is to equip healthcare professionals with theoretical, clinical, research and management skills that enable the promotion of evidence-based emergency care across the continent. Because it is fully online, it increases access to education for those working in rural and remote areas. It runs over a year, consisting of 6 courses (subjects).
I convene the leadership module on the program, and I created a reflexive leadership portfolio as leadership development tool.
Other teaching
I teach on the MPhil Global Emergency Care. The aim of the course is to prepare students to engage on critical health issues through an understanding of the dynamic interplay between social, economic, cultural, and environmental factors that contribute to health, illness and injury. I am responsible for the following aspects on the course: community, emergency care components and human capital.
I do occasional lectures or guest lectures for the Division of Global Surgery on the Global Surgery Foundations course where I speak about systems thinking and improvement models. I teach the same topics on the the Global Surgery module on the Masters in Public Health at UCT.
Recognition of Prior Learning iniative
As part of the Post-Graduate Diploma, I designed and implemented a Recognition of Prior Learning program. There are many vocationally trained emergency medical providers (paramedics/nurses) in Africa and developing a program that allows them access to Higher Education provides career progress. We currently have up to 70 RPL candidates doing the portfolio per year. This is one of the only programs offering access to post-graduate studies to vocationally trained healthcare workers in Africa. I’m very proud of the work I’ve done on enabling access to education for this group of practitioners.
I supervise a PhD candidate that considered the support needs and process of these practitioners when they enter Higher Education, and you can read more about the studies here.
Teaching on structured short-courses
I’ve trained on a number of structured short courses, including the WHO-ICRC Basic Emergency Care Course that I’ve taught in Zambia, Tanzania, Uganda, Malawi and Ethiopia. I’m also the voice on some of the modules of the WHO-ICRC Basic Emergency Care: Approach to the acutely ill and injured patient; an open-access training course for first response healthcare workers in limited resource settings.
Community response systems are close to my heart, and I’m a trainer for the Western Cape Emergency First Aid Responder (EFAR), which teaches and implements community first response. I’m also a trainer for the AFEM Community First Aid Responder (CFAR) program.
I prefer teaching where I can be innovative and adaptive. But as the below pictures show, when teaching in low resource settings, it is a requirement to be creative and innovative to optimise teaching.
The development of the Post-Graduate Diploma in Emergency Care was supported by the UCT Centre for Learning and Teaching (CILT), and they shared this video on their YouTube page as exemplar to others wanting to design online offerings.
Research supervision
Part of my teaching role includes research supervision. I did the Online Training Course for Supervisors of Doctoral Candidates at African Universities through the University of Stellenbosch to better prepare me for my role as supervisor. The topics I supervise are rather broad, it includes topics on education, sense-making (psychological safety, identity work in EMS), operational research e.g. performance management and developing community first aid response systems. There is also some more ‘traditional’ emergency medicine studies in there. I prefer supervising candidates that are using methodologies such as Participatory Action Research, Grounded Theory, Narrative Methods.