A Challenge Called Charlie
One evening in March this year, I was lying in bed, scrolling through Facebook when I came across a video ad for a walker called the Lifeglider. I normally ignore most video ads, but for some reason this one grabbed…
Expert work is a specialty of its own
Following the completion of the November 2018 UCT course in The Provision of Expert Opinion and Evidence as a Health Professional, I was asked whether one could attend a one day workshop focused on medico-legal report writing only, rather than…
Post Stroke Rehabilitation
S Whitehead, MBChB and E Baalbergen, MBChB Life Rehabilitation Unit, Vincent Pallotti Hospital. Cape Town, South Africa Corresponding author: se_whitehead@yahoo.com ABSTRACT: This article offers insights into post stroke rehabilitation. It is an overview of a complex subject. Stroke is a…
Lest we forget …
The four minutes it took to watch the video link below whilst searching for illustrative material to be included in an upcoming workshop, were well spent and enormously powerful. When one works with incapacity, disability, ill-health and trauma in an…
The expert witness and the art of listening
There is a striking moment during the café scene in the movie Before Sunset in which the leading actress Julie Delpy, playing the role of Céline, describes how her brain was ‘free from the consuming frenzy’ while living in the foreign and…
The provision of sustained quality patient care is rooted in the health of the practitioner
Burnout is neither a new concept, nor a new experience to many who work in the demanding environment of healthcare. There is any number of articles and studies to be found on the subject when one carries out a Google…
The benefits of sound ergonomics in the workplace
In an earlier article (“Depression in the workplace – shifting perspective and changing the conversation” - May 2018) I referred to the importance of leadership and case management in preventing and managing depression in the work environment, a prevalent and…
‘Creativity involves breaking out of established patterns to look at things in a different way’
Do you see the duck or the rabbit? One of the greatest lessons learned during my professional career to date is that there is always another way to look at things - and the same set of facts can be…
The importance of professional purpose as an expert witness
The medico-legal expert witness space appears to have started to become rather crowded in recent years, with an increasing number of health professionals believing this to be a desired area of practice, some virtually immediately post-graduation. As the pool of…