UKZN Lecturer Receives Prestigious Fellowship for African Scholars

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UKZN’s Public Health Medicine Lecturer, Mrs Tivani Mashamba-Thompson, is one of 20 recipients in Africa of the prestigious African Doctoral Dissertation Research Fellowships (ADDRF) for 2015.

The ADDRF Programme supports the training and retention of highly-skilled, locally-trained scholars in research and academic positions across the region.

Mashamba-Thompson - who is within two years of completing her thesis titled: "Evaluating the Accessibility and Utility of HIV-Related Point-of-Care (POC) Diagnostics for Maternal Health in Rural South Africa" - said she was honoured and humbled to be a recipient of the award.

Her study explores the cultural norms, knowledge, skills, biomedical and management issues which need to be addressed prior to the implementation of the new POC diagnostics in rural resource limited settings to ensure applicability and sustainability of these diagnostics.

Mashamba-Thompson said it was estimated that the deployment of new POC diagnostics could prevent more than 1.2 million deaths in the developing world, including deaths caused by HIV and AIDS co-infections such as Bacterial Pneumonia, Syphilis, Tuberculosis and deaths caused by Malaria.

She said: ‘Barriers and challenges associated with the implementation of POC diagnostics in South Africa as a result of the complexity and diversity of the diagnostics have been clearly demonstrated in previous studies.’

According to Mashamba-Thompson, little attention is paid to factors which ensure successful implementation of new POC diagnostics.

‘The applicability and sustainability of these diagnostics require the involvement of all stakeholders during implementation. I also believe that the implementation must be performed within a given context and culture to ensure the utility of technologies that have been generated in high-income countries for use in low income countries.

‘Coming from a practical applied Medical Science background, I have always been interested in innovation in scientific diagnostics. While I was working as a Biomedical Scientist in the UK, one of my duties was to carry out quality assurance of hospital ward-based point-of-care diagnostics. I also had an opportunity to undergo postgraduate training on point-of-care-testing at the University of Greenwich in London,’ she said.

‘It became apparent to me that POC diagnostics will revolutionise laboratory and diagnostic services for patients and health providers globally. A major advantage of POC diagnostics over the standard laboratory testing is the ability to provide rapid results, permitting timely initiation of suitable therapy as well as facilitating linkages to care and referrals.’

Mashamba-Thompson said appropriately used POC diagnostic services also had the potential to improve healthcare services by enabling improved delivery of pathology testing in settings which have limited access to laboratory infrastructure which is usually the case in rural communities of South Africa.

She grew up in Limpopo Province and left the country in 1998 to explore career opportunities in the United Kingdom, returning in 2012.

Mashamba-Thompson received the 2014 UKZN Golden Key Merit award in recognition of her community work and academic achievements; the 2015 South African Centre for Epidemiological Modelling and Analysis Scholarship and obtained full BREC approval in less than a year after registration for her PhD.

Inspired by the death of her mother who suffered from an untreatable and incurable type of neurodegenerative disease known as motor neurone disease, her masters research – supervised by the Dean and Head of the School of Health Sciences and Associate Professor of Pharmaceutical Sciences, Professor Mahmoud Soliman – comprised molecular modelling studies on selective enzyme inhibitors such as anti-neurodegenerative diseases.

‘I believe I have made a significant contribution to the search for an effective treatment and cure for neurodegenerative diseases,’ said the Masters summa cum laude graduate.

Mashamba-Thompson said she was also privileged to receive research support from highly skilled supervisors and mentors Professor Benn Sartorius (UKZN); Dr Paul Drain (Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School); Miss Cynthia Shi (Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health) and the SACEMA team. She also acknowledged the invaluable contribution of the Department of Rural Health in nurturing her from a Medical Laboratory Scientist to an international recognised public health Researcher.

‘I am also very grateful to have a wonderful and supportive husband and three healthy children who are beside me through thick and thin.’

Lunga Memela