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Voices from the Free State podcast: Episode five – featuring Dr Anchen Laubscher

07 June 2021 | Story Dr Nitha Ramnath

A passion for evidence-based medicine and the notion of value in healthcare is what drives Dr Anchen Laubscher, our guest in the fifth episode of the Voices from the Free State podcast. Anchen is driven to ensure that healthcare is scientifically proven, of high quality, cost effective, and tailored to a patient’s needs.

François van Schalkwyk and Keenan Carelse, UFS alumni leading the university’s United Kingdom Alumni Chapter, have put their voices together to produce and direct the podcast series. Intended to reconnect alumni with the university and their university experience, the podcasts will be featured on the first Monday of every month, ending in November 2021. Our featured alumni share and reflect on their experiences at the UFS, how it has shaped their lives, and relate why their ongoing association with the UFS is still relevant and important. The podcasts are authentic conversations – they provide an opportunity for the university to understand and learn about the experiences of its alumni and to celebrate the diversity and touchpoints that unite them.

Our podcast guest

Anchen joined Netcare in 2007 as an aeromedical doctor and has been with the group for almost 14 years. As Group Medical Director of Netcare Ltd, Anchen is responsible for the strategic oversight and operational execution of all clinical and quality-related matters across the different divisions of Netcare. Leading a team of subject matter experts, Anchen oversees the group’s key deliverables related to the value of care, encompassing quality outcomes, patient safety, patient experience, and episode cost efficiency, with all components of ‘value’ digitally enabled and data driven.

Anchen is a member of the Hospital Association of South Africa (HASA) subcommittee for Clinical Quality and the South African Committee of Medical Deans (SACOMD) initiative, which was constituted to address the human resource dilemma specifically related to the training of doctors in South Africa. She is a Council member of the University of the Free State, where she also serves on the Senate and holds director appointments in the Mother and Child Academic Hospital (MACAH) Foundation, the My Walk My Soul collaboration between Netcare and Adcock-Ingram and the University of Cape Town Medical Centre Ltd. Anchen played a pioneering leadership role in South Africa’s response to the 2014 global Ebola Virus Disease (EVD) outbreak, which continues in her role as Gold Command in Netcare and as member of various national committee and advisory structures related to the COVID-19 pandemic preparedness and response. For her role in the South African EVD response, she was recognised with an honorary award from the South African Military Health Services (SAMHS).

Clinically, Anchen continues to contribute to the specialty of emergency medicine, specifically pre-hospital and aeromedicine. She continues to be involved at her alma mater through ad hoc lecturing in electives, research support at GIBS, and participating in health-care courses and conferences such as the 2020 Healthcare Industry Update and Innovation Conference.

Stay tuned for episode six to be released on 5 July 2021.

For further information regarding the podcast series, or to propose other alumni guests, please email us at alumnipodcast@ufs.ac.za

Listen to all the Voices from the Free State podcasts.

News Archive

Self-help building project helps to change lives

2017-12-15

Anita Venter, lecturer in the Centre for Development Support, with the residents of
the eco friendly house. Photo: Supplied

UFS PhD student Anita Venter did not know it in the beginning, but her doctoral research would eventually change her life and the lives of many others.

The research was whether South Africa’s housing policies were socially and culturally responsive to grassroots reality in informal settlements. Venter agreed her research approach might have raised a few eye brows, but it was a journey she holds had more benefits than failures.

Green living
For her case studies, Venter looked at ‘Start Living Green’ as a concept and further examined the implementation models of Earthship Biotecture Academy in New Mexico and Central America and the Long Way Home non-profit organisation in Guatemala.

These groups train people with no specialised construction skills in applying and managing environmentally sound self-help building projects. Furthermore, their primary objectives were not building-related, but people-centred, with an advocacy role to create social, environmental and educational change through utilising the building technologies.

It resulted in Venter signing up for a course in Guatemala to get the skills to implement her case studies here at home in Bloemfontein.

An experimental mud, straw and waste material structure in her back yard grew into similar houses built in informal settlements, through the transfer of knowledge of indigenous building methods.

Are rickety corrugated iron shacks only alternative?

Her case studies, one in Freedom Square in the Mangaung Metro Municipality, highlighted, among others, baffling tenure insecurities and “tangible conflicts” entrenched between Westernised and African perspectives on home ownership.

Venter says her thesis, in essence, did not oppose existing housing strategies but did challenge the applicability of an economically inclined model as the most appropriate housing option for millions of households living in informal settlements.

The main findings of the case studies were that self-help building technologies and skills transfer could make a significant contribution to addressing housing shortages in the country; in particular in geographical locations such as the Free State province and other rural areas.

Venter’s own words after her academic endeavour are insightful: “These grassroots individuals’ courage to engage with me in unknown territories, gave me hope in humanity and inherent strength to keep on pursuing our vision of transforming informal settlements into evolving indigenous neighbourhoods of choice instead of only being living spaces of last resort.”

Positive results
The study has had many positive results. The City of Cape Town is now looking at new innovative building technologies as a result. Most importantly Venter's study will open further discussions that necessarily challenge the status quo views in housing development.

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