Appointment of Professor Lydia Cairncross

Congratulations to Professor Lydia Cairncross who is appointed as Head of Department: Department of Surgery, commencing on 1 January 2023.

I look forward to welcoming her to the management team and working alongside her. I am deeply grateful to Professor Graham Feiggen for his outstanding leadership and the immense contribution he has made to the Surgery landscape both within our local context and further afield. I wish him well in his continued engagement in the Faculty in other roles.

Professor Cairncross leads a highly effective clinical team at Groote Schuur Hospital (GSH) and a large, academic Division in Surgery, providing high quality surgical care to communities both in the immediate vicinity of GSH and further afield, through various outreach programmes. She has ensured best clinical practice, grounded in academic excellence through innovative practical solutions to respond to resource constraints in the public sector. These include innovative partnerships with NPO’s like PinkDrive, Project Flamingo, and more recently Gift of the Givers. These partnerships have improved access to surgical care in the public sector, both before, during and after the COVID-19 pandemic.

Professor Cairncross is a recognised leader in her subspecialist field of surgery, playing a key role in developing context-appropriate national policy guidelines for a range of surgical conditions and spearheading innovative systems-based research into promoting earlier diagnosis of cancer. She is a committed and enthusiastic teacher on the undergraduate and postgraduate teaching and learning platforms both locally and nationally and is a popular student mentor.

Professor Cairncross, in her time as the Head: Division of General Surgery, has instituted a range of interventions to support postgraduate teaching and learning including a more integrated clinical training programme, proactive wellness interventions, and the development of a working model for workplace-based assessment in general surgery. Throughout her medical and surgical career, Professor Cairncross has engaged in public advocacy for improved access, quality, and equity in healthcare through engagements with the National Department of Health as a technical advisor, as a Ministerial Advisory Committee member, and through work with various NGO’s including the Treatment Action Campaign, Cancer Alliance, the C-19 People’s Coalition and the People’s Health Movement of South Africa. She engages directly with the communities in Cape Town and surrounding areas, sharing education on cancer and health systems through popular education workshops.

She is also an active member of the UCT Division of Global Surgery as Director for Advocacy and Community Engagement. Professor Cairncross brings to the Department of Surgery a unique combination of subspecialist academic surgical skills, a deeply held public health and equity perspective and a strong leadership and management profile.

Her vision is to build an academic Department of Surgery which is connected to the community it services; trains world-class doctors and surgeons; produces new knowledge relevant to South Africa, Africa, and the world; and is committed to the holistic concept of primary health care delivering quality surgical care along the entire pathway from the primary level through to complex tertiary and quaternary services.