Latest News Archive

Please select Category, Year, and then Month to display items
Categories
UFS News Media Release Research
Years
2017 2018 2019 2020 2021 2022 2023 2024
Months
January February March April July May June August September October November December
Previous Archive
11 July 2023 | Story Leonie Bolleurs | Photo Sonia Small, Kaleidoscope
Prof Corinna Walsh
Prof Corinna Walsh and her collaborators were awarded the South Africa – Sweden University Forum (SASUF) Virtual Exchange Grant that commenced at the beginning of 2023.

Prof Corinna Walsh, Professor in the Department of Nutrition and Dietetics at the University of the Free State (UFS), and her collaborators have been awarded the South Africa – Sweden University Forum (SASUF) Virtual Exchange Grant, which commenced at the beginning of 2023.

Prof Walsh is also the first academic at the UFS to receive this grant, which will allow her to embark on a virtual exchange programme in nutrition and public health education.

SASUF, a project to strengthen collaboration in research and education between South Africa and Sweden, was launched in 2017, and to date has connected more than 3 000 Swedish and South African researchers and students in workshops and seminars.

According to Chevon Slambee, the local coordinator for SASUF in the UFS Office for International Affairs, the SASUF initiative is one of the tools to expand the physical classroom into an interconnected virtual classroom. This strongly aligns with the aims to internationalise the curriculum, which has been mandatory for institutions of higher education since 2020, according to the National Policy Framework for the Internationalisation of Higher Education in South Africa.

SASUF virtual exchange grant

This grant was awarded to Prof Walsh and her collaborators five years after she started her SASUF journey when she crossed paths with Prof Ilona Grünberger, Professor in Public Health Sciences at Stockholm University, Sweden, and Prof Anneli Ivarsson, Professor and Consultant in Paediatrics in the Department of Epidemiology and Global Health at Umeå University, Sweden.

Profs Grünberger and Walsh discovered shared research and teaching interests and decided to apply for a SASUF collaborative research grant, which they received in late 2019. They participated in several SASUF workshops and collaborated on a teaching project, where Prof Walsh delivered guest lectures and interacted with students during seminars and online discussions in the master’s programme in Public Health at Stockholm University. One of her lectures focused on improving nutrition and health outcomes in the first 1 000 days of life.

Last year (2022), Prof Walsh presented at a SASUF Goes Digital workshop while visiting Sweden, discussing a life course approach to children's health, development, and well-being. Besides networking and exploring potential research collaborations, she also used this opportunity to attend presentations and discussions on women's health, adolescent mental health, and healthy ageing at Stockholm University and the Karolinska Institute.

In the same year (2022), she submitted a joint application for SASUF Virtual Exchange during the new round of SASUF grants. Her submission, titled Public health nutrition in the context of global public health: Capacity development for health education and public health through virtual exchange between Sweden and South Africa, was one of 13 projects successfully selected from the 50 applications received.

According to Prof Walsh, maternal and child health are an important research focus in both South Africa and Sweden. “Shared studies present the opportunity to build capacity to provide evidence for understanding the developmental origins of health and disease in these very different contexts,” she says.

Prof Walsh explains that they have expanded their group for this virtual exchange collaboration to include Dr Zakir Hossin, a postdoctoral researcher from the Division of Clinical Epidemiology at the Karolinska Institute, Prof Zandile Mchiza from the SA Medical Research Council (MRC) and School of Public Health at the University of the Western Cape, and Dr Whadi-ah Parker from the Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC).

The group’s first activity was hosting a workshop titled, Life course epidemiology: Methodological issues in life course research for global public health during the in-person SASUF Sustainability Forum at the University of the Western Cape in March.

She says the funding, networking, and collaboration benefits of the SASUF programme are what motivated their group to apply for the grant this time around.

“Through this programme, we can also further develop meaningful, virtual intercultural interactions between students, teachers, researchers and other stakeholders, including the South African Medical Research Council (MRC) and the Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC),” she states, indicating that the project will see undergraduate, master’s, and doctoral students, as well as postdoctoral fellows, participate in the virtual exchange activities.

“Teaching and learning activities will facilitate students’ involvement in cross-cultural teamwork, understanding and problem-solving, sharing of experiences and co-creation of knowledge,” says Prof Walsh, who is of the opinion that virtual exchange programmes provide students with an exciting platform to expand their worldview.

This process will also involve the exchange and co-creation of teaching materials by Swedish and South African teams; online interactions of student groups during online and hybrid courses in public health and nutrition; co-supervision of dissertations at an advanced level and mentoring of doctoral students by senior researchers and postdoctoral fellows from collaborating countries; as well as the active involvement of doctoral students and postdoctoral fellows in international collaborative teaching activities.

Future expectations

“Developing our students in the areas of public health, global public health and public health ethics, and public health nutrition, has the potential to benefit both the students and the communities in which they work,” says Prof Walsh.

Furthermore, the SASUF Virtual Exchange Programme also addresses all the key principles as outlined in the UFS’ Vision 130, namely excellence, impact and innovation in putting the needs of others first, delivering significant work, and constantly changing to remain relevant in the highly competitive international higher education market.

News Archive

Heart diseases a time bomb in Africa, says UFS expert
2010-05-17

 Prof. Francis Smit

There are a lot of cardiac problems in Africa. Sub-Saharan Africa is home to the largest population of rheumatic heart disease patients in the world and therefore hosts the largest rheumatic heart valve population in the world. They are more than one million, compared to 33 000 in the whole of the industrialised world, says Prof. Francis Smit, Head of the Department of Cardiothoracic Surgery at the Faculty of Health Sciences at the University of the Free State (UFS).

He delivered an inaugural lecture on the topic Cardiothoracic Surgery: Complex simplicity, or simple complexity?

“We are also sitting on a time bomb of ischemic heart disease with the WHO (World Health Organisation) estimating that CAD (coronary artery disease) will become the number-one killer in our region by 2020. HIV/Aids is expected to go down to number 7.”

Very little is done about it. There is neither a clear nor coordinated programme to address this expected epidemic and CAD is regarded as an expensive disease, confined to Caucasians in the industrialised world. “We are ignoring alarming statistics about incidences of adult obesity, diabetes and endemic hypertension in our black population and a rising incidence of coronary artery interventions and incidents in our indigenous population,” Prof. Smit says.

Outside South Africa – with 44 units – very few units (about seven) perform low volumes of basic cardiac surgery. The South African units at all academic institutions are under severe threat and about 70% of cardiac procedures are performed in the private sector.

He says the main challenge in Africa has become sustainability, which needs to be addressed through education. Cardiothoracic surgery must become part of everyday surgery in Africa through alternative education programmes. That will make this specialty relevant at all levels of healthcare and it must be involved in resource allocation to medicine in general and cardiothoracic surgery specifically.

The African surgeon should make the maximum impact at the lowest possible cost to as many people in a society as possible. “Our training in fields like intensive care and insight into pulmonology, gastroenterology and cardiology give us the possibility of expanding our roles in African medicine. We must also remember that we are trained physicians as well.

“Should people die or suffer tremendously while we can train a group of surgical specialists or retraining general surgeons to expand our impact on cardiothoracic disease in Africa using available technology maybe more creatively? We have made great progress in establishing an African School for Cardiothoracic Surgery.”

Prof. Smit also highlighted the role of the annual Hannes Meyer National Registrar Symposium that culminated in having an eight-strong international panel sponsored by the ICC of EACTS to present a scientific course as well as advanced surgical techniques in conjunction with the Hannes Meyer Symposium in 2010.

Prof. Smit says South Africa is fast becoming the driving force in cardiothoracic surgery in Africa. South Africa is the only country that has the knowledge, technology and skills base to act as the springboard for the development of cardiothoracic surgery in Africa.

South Africa, however, is experiencing its own problems. Mortality has doubled in the years from 1997 to 2005 and half the population in the Free State dies between 40 to 44 years of age.

“If we do not need health professionals to determine the quality and quantity of service delivery to the population and do not want to involve them in this process, we can get rid of them, but then the political leaders making that decision must accept responsibility for the clinical outcomes and life expectancies of their fellow citizens.

“We surely cannot expect to impose the same medical legal principles on professionals working in unsafe hospitals and who have complained and made authorities aware of these conditions than upon those working in functional institutions. Either fixes the institutions or indemnifies medical personnel working in these conditions and defends the decision publicly.

“Why do I have to choose the three out of four patients that cannot have a lifesaving operation and will have to die on their own while the system pretends to deliver treatment to all?”

Prof. Smit says developing a service package with guidelines in the public domain will go a long way towards addressing this issue. It is also about time that we have to admit that things are simply not the same. Standards are deteriorating and training outcomes are or will be affected.

The people who make decisions that affect healthcare service delivery and outcomes, the quality of training platforms and research, in a word, the future of South African medicine, firstly need rules and boundaries. He also suggested that maybe the government should develop health policy in the public domain and then outsource healthcare delivery to people who can actually deliver including thousands of experts employed but ignored by the State at present.

“It is time that we all have to accept our responsibilities at all levels… and act decisively on matters that will determine the quality and quantity of medical care for this and future generations in South Africa and Africa. Time is running out,” Prof. Smit says.
 

We use cookies to make interactions with our websites and services easy and meaningful. To better understand how they are used, read more about the UFS cookie policy. By continuing to use this site you are giving us your consent to do this.

Accept