Helene-Mari van der Westhuizen
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helenemari.bsky.social
Helene-Mari van der Westhuizen
@helenemari.bsky.social
🇿🇦 Medical doctor & postdoctoral researcher based at Oxford University. Loves talking about TB, lectures in global health.
@trishgreenhalgh.bsky.social @tbproof.bsky.social please help share the invitation 😊
April 22, 2025 at 11:37 AM
Such a great paper! We are looking for a speaker for our symposium on new developments in TB IPC at the union conference - could this be of interest?
April 4, 2025 at 1:20 PM
With thanks to the @rhodestrust.bsky.social for the opportunity to do this work at @ox.ac.uk, and my supervisors Chris Butler, Sarah Tonkin-Crine Rodney Ehrlich and @trishgreenhalgh.bsky.social 📚 /6
December 6, 2024 at 8:44 AM
Here I looked at how Ubuntu as African-centric approach can help mitigate this - through shifting the focus to communal wellbeing instead of individual protection, using universal infection control measures instead of targeted ones, and thinking about how health workers communicate about IPC. 5/
December 6, 2024 at 8:44 AM
Next paper focusses on stigma: TB is a stigmatised disease because of its associations with poverty, HIV and its mortality. When only people who are ill with TB wear masks, masks become a symbol of TB and contribute to stigma. Yet they are important to prevent the spread of TB. 5/
December 6, 2024 at 8:44 AM
We look at whether proficiency at TB IPC helped with Covid-19 IPC and how conceptualisations of what mask-wearing means changed. 😷 4/
December 6, 2024 at 8:44 AM
It was a slow 14 year process. The organisation’s leader was actively involved in making sense of ☝️why TB IPC was important and ☝️what effective IPC entails. There were critical events, like a health worker falling ill with TB and opportunities to link TB IPC with other processes (eg. triage) 3/
December 6, 2024 at 8:44 AM
I conducted an organisational case study where TB infection control (mask wearing, ventilation, triage) is implemented well💡
www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....
This is a rural, low resource setting - so odds were stacked against success. What happened?? 2/
Airborne infection prevention and control implementation: A positive deviant organisational case study of tuberculosis and COVID-19 at a South African rural district hospital
There are many examples of poor TB infection prevention and control (IPC) implementation in the academic literature, describing a high-risk environment for nosocomial spread of airborne diseases to...
www.tandfonline.com
December 6, 2024 at 8:44 AM