Assoc Prof Clint Hendrikse

Associate Professor Clint Hendrikse is head of division for Emergency Medicine in the Department of Family, Community and Emergency Care at the University of Cape Town. He also holds a joint academic-service appointment as Metro West Emergency Medicine Lead with the Western Cape Department of Health and Wellness, and outside of this serves as one of the medical commanders for the Provincial Health Operations Centre, alongside clinical work in Metro West.

His research centres on equitable access to emergency care, with a strong focus on what this looks like in practice across South Africa and the wider region — taking context and local realities seriously rather than applying a one-size-fits-all standard. Part of this work explores Community-Oriented Emergency Care (COEC) as a concept, working out what it means in practice and how it can best be developed to extend emergency care capacity beyond the walls of the hospital. A significant strand also looks critically at how clinical guidelines and standards of "best practice" are developed, asking what a genuinely context-appropriate standard of "good practice" looks like when it is built from local evidence from the outset, rather than imported unadjusted from elsewhere.

Associate Professor Hendrikse increasingly works within ecosystems to optimise how care is delivered across the system as a whole. This connects closely to his work on effective triage and patient sorting, an area he has been closely involved in through the Emergency Medicine Society of South Africa's (EMSSA) national triage work. His research also extends into trauma systems strengthening — including surveillance, injury outcomes and care pathways in emergency centres — as well as into health systems and workforce planning more broadly, including his current PhD research on emergency centre scheduling models.

In terms of interdivisional collaboration, he leads COEC, a Mastercard Foundation-funded project under Health Futures South Africa that extends emergency care capacity into under-resourced communities and crosses several divisions and faculties.