Dr Lindi van Niekerk is a medical doctor and the Inclusive Healthcare Innovation (iHI) Lead at the UCT Bertha Centre for Social Innovation. “As a young doctor, I was driven to cure patients,” she says,” but I soon realised the answer often didn’t lie in my prescription.” That’s when she and colleagues set up an End of Life care programme for terminal patients and their families. The project is still running and growing. It also set Lindi on a search for more real solutions to real-world problems. In January 2014, she pioneered the first iHI Summit in Africa and also produced a 112-page Health Innovator’s Review profiling hands-on innovators improving local healthcare every day.
[…] Dr Lindi Van Niekerk led the GSH Innovation Programme seminar launch by explaining how the programme is an opportunity for staff to turn their ideas into a reality, and in so doing, solve some the hospital’s biggest challenges. Van Niekerk explained how the UCT GSB Bertha Centre, in partnership with the Innovation Unit (London), conducted research to identify the major pressing challenges, hindering care delivery, from the staff perspective. […]