Thirusha Naidu

• PhD
• Lecturer at University of KwaZulu-Natal

Introduction Relapse is a significant challenge among people with schizophrenia and is broadly recognized by the aggravation of positive or negative symptoms, the need for re-hospitalization, more intensive case management, and/or changes in medication. The quality of inpatient care and proper transition to outpatient care are crucial in reducing t...

The imperative for decolonial research in health professions education (HPE) is rooted in a resistance to coloniality, which characterises modern medicine and HPE. Coloniality is a residual effect of colonialism, which upholds White, Western, Eurocentric knowledge systems while simultaneously marginalising diverse epistemologies. We outline the pro...

Introduction Relapse among individuals with serious mental illnesses in resource-limited contexts, including South Africa, is a significant concern. To date, the risks for relapse among this population is well documented, but little is known about prevention strategies to reduce its occurrence in these resource-limited settings. Therefore, this qua...

Despite recent calls to engage in scholarship with attention to anti-racism, equity, and social justice at a global level in Health Professions Education (HPE), the field has made few significant advances in incorporating the views of the so-called "Other" in understanding the nature, origin, and scope of knowledge as well as the epistemic justific...

Background Like other fields in medicine, medical education relies on collaboration and cooperation between countries and regions of the world, although no single institution or position unifies the global medical education community in the way that the WHO does in public health, for example. Recent research in medical education has drawn attention...

Contemporary research practices link to colonial and imperialist knowledge creation and production and may promote harmful perspectives on marginalized and oppressed groups. We present a framework for a decolonial approach to research in global health and health promotion applicable across research settings. This framework is aimed at anticipating...

Introduction Global South researchers struggle to publish in Global North journals, including journals dedicated to research on health professions education (HPE). As a consequence, Western perspectives and values dominate the international academic landscape of HPE. This study sought to understand Global South researchers’ motivations and experien...

Clinical psychology practice is characterised by three core functions; assessment, diagnosis, and treatment. We challenge the biomedical imperative in clinical psychology through our shared personal experiences in training as clinical psychologists in South Africa. We pose that the training of clinical psychologists historically was, and continues,...

Healthcare leaders discuss the ways in which colonial-era bias and eugenics persist in today’s medical education and clinical practice in the UK and beyond, and what meaningful change is required to overcome racial and other healthcare inequalities

Issue: The World Federation for Medical Education (WFME) was established in 1972 and in the five decades that followed, has been the de facto global agency for medical education. Despite this apparently formidable remit, it has received little analysis in the academic literature. Evidence: In this article, we examine the historical context at the t...

Background: Health professions education (HPE) must keep pace with rapid shifts in learning and societal contexts, control of resources, knowledge and environmental concerns. Sustainability is increasingly seen as complex, balancing the three pillars of economy, society and the environment and addressing the current generation's needs without comp...

This is an editorial for the special collection on equity, diversity and inclusion (EDI) for MedEdPublish. In this article, the guest advisors of this collection first reflect on the paradoxes in EDI in health professions education (HPE), then on the importance of recognising the existence of multiple authenticities on the basis of different contex...

Medical education research is rooted in a long tradition of objectivity, evidence-based methods, and clinical surety. However, the inexorable confidence, health professions research education, and scholarship have in the manifest supremacy of western science as the foundational epistemology is questionable. Is this bravado legitimate and if so by w...

Clinical psychology practice is characterised by three core functions; assessment, diagnosis, and treatment. We challenge the biomedical imperative in clinical psychology through our shared personal experiences in training as clinical psychologists in South Africa. We pose that the training of clinical psychologists historically was, and continues,...

Introduction Access to mental health services is a challenge, especially for young people who are over-represented in the unemployment and poverty index in South Africa. Therefore, continuing care is a problem after hospital discharge for young people with first-episode psychosis (FEP) due to a lack of clinical engagement and follow-up, for which t...

Health professions education is governed by sets of rules, some of which are explicitly stated on admissions documents, policy websites or accreditation guidelines. This chapter describes the utility of critical discourse analysis as a method to rigorously examine, and potentially navigate, complex challenges in healthcare and education. It offers...

Generational consciousness is introduced with special reference to Zulu culture. Both broad and specific views of ancestors are included. A qualitative study using ethnographic observation, cultural immersion, etic and emic researcher perspectives, researcher reflexivity, and interviews with indigenous Zulu community members is presented with speci...

This commentary presents the position that modern medicine is a colonial artefact in the sense that the type of scientific thinking that underpins modern medicine emerged from western knowledge structures based on a history of colonialism. The author suggests the colonial roots of Western-based modern medicine must be re-examined. While there are v...

Introduction: South Africa (SA) has a high HIV prevalence and limited mental healthcare resources. Neuropsychiatric complications such as psychosis onset in people living with HIV (PLWHIV) remains poorly understood. The study aims to compare the socio-demographic, clinical, substance use, cognitive and trauma profile of PLWHIV presenting with first...

Global medical education is dominated by a Northern tilt. Global universities’ faculty and students dominate research, scholarship and teaching about what is termed global education. This tilt has been fixed in global biomedical education with some acknowledgement from the Global South of the comparative benefits of global exchange. Student exchang...

The body has long been considered a site of oppression. The pandemic has highlighted this once again as disadvantaged people and those from racial and ethnic minorities are disproportionately affected by COVID-19. I argue that language, and specifically naming, is used as a tool to constantly redefine the Other, keeping them in a constantly undefin...

Health professions education (HPE) is built on a structural foundation of modernity based on Eurocentric epistemologies. This foundation privileges certain forms of evidence and ways of knowing and is implicated in how dominant models of HPE curricula and health-care practice position concepts of knowledge, equity, and social justice. This invited...

Stigma is an important social determinant of health-seeking behavior; however, the nature and extent of its association with depression among people living with multidrug-resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB) are not well-understood. We enrolled 200 microbiologically confirmed MDR-TB inpatients at a TB specialist hospital in KwaZulu-Natal Province, an ar...

The COVID-19 pandemic is another challenge in South Africa's history, which is characterized by apartheid and its aftermath, the AIDS pandemic, and ongoing social and transgenerational trauma. South Africans have experienced serial collective trauma. The virus arrived here later than in the other parts of the world, offering possible respite to alr...

Objectives Optimising medication adherence is one of the essential factors in reversing the tide of a TB‐HIV syndemic in sub‐Saharan Africa, especially South Africa. Impairment in key neurocognitive domains may impair patients’ ability to maintain adherence to treatment, but the level of cognition and its relationship to HIV status has not been exa...

Communication is increasingly being recognised as a core competency in health professions education and practice in South Africa. The Health Professions Council of South Africa has made the adoption of a modified version of the CanMEDS core competencies framework obligatory to facilitate the development of core competencies in the medical, dental a...

In these days of overwhelming clinical work, decreased resources, and increased educational demands, time has become a priceless commodity. Competency-based medical education attempts to address this challenge by increasing educational efficiency and decreasing the "steeping" of learners in clinical activities for set durations of time. However, in...

Many have championed the role of the health humanities in teaching empathy, enhancing clinical skills, increasing reflective practice, and contributing to health professional wellness. These are all laudable goals; however, when competing for limited curricular time and attention, these subjects are often shunted to, as Catherine Belling so eloquen...

The role of the humanities in medical education remains a topic of dynamic debate in medical schools of high-income countries. However, in most low- and middle-income countries, the medical humanities are less topical and rarely even have a place in the curriculum. Reasons for this dearth include inadequate resources to support such programs couple...

Although neurocognitive impairment (NCI) is a well-recognized challenge in human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), there is little evidence regarding it among individuals with multiple drug-resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB) within HIV endemic sub-Saharan Africa. The extent of NCI risk, particularly HIV-associated neurocognitive disorders (HAND) risk, was...

Purpose Household food insecurity in South Africa is a pervasive public health challenge. Although its link to chronic health conditions is well established, its relationship to mental illness, particularly major depression, is not well-understood. Despite KwaZulu-Natal Province being the epicenter of the drug-resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB) epidem...

This article is the product of many conversations, debates and reflections amongst three colleagues, as we contemplated our careers as clinical psychologists in the public service in South Africa. Having trained at roughly five year intervals since 1995, our paths intersected in 2013 when we found ourselves working together in a public hospital in...

Abstract: Ethical considerations in communicating results to participants in community-based qualitative research are scrutinized less than in medical or genetics research. We report on ethical issues considered in planning, preparing and returning of study findings to members of a community-based organization who provide care and support services...

Researchers are constantly challenged in maintaining participants’ anonymity in social and health research. Challenges arise when participants’ request to relinquish anonymity or can be recognised in published material. In this chapter, I consider possible circumstances and conditions where researchers might forego disguising or concealing particip...

Tuberculosis and HIV are major contributors to the burden of disease in South Africa. Both diseases also have a reportedly high level of stigma. MDR-TB is a more serious type of TB and to date, there are few studies that investigate potential social psychological implications associated with these complications Specifically little is known about st...

Research on cumulative risk is growing, however, little work has occurred in low- or middle-income countries, and few studies have focused on processes linking risk to outcomes. This study explored relations between components of cumulative risk and adjustment in a sample of 324 South African youth (M age = 13.11 years; SD = 1.54 years; 65% female;...

Talk therapy Toolkit is the first truly South African text about practicing psychotherapy and counselling in resource constrained settings predominant in the global South. The motivation for writing this book was “context inspires practice”. This is a practical accessible text that will guide emerging therapists in South Africa and possibly other c...

The idea of exporting the concept of reflective practice for a global medical education audience is growing. However, the uncritical export and adoption of Western concepts of reflection may be inappropriate in non-Western societies. The emphasis in Western medical education on the use of reflection for a specific end-that is, the improvement of in...

This case study presents the use of poetry in psychotherapy with an adolescent girl, Buhle (a pseudonym), who needed surgery to correct a curvature of her spine due to adolescent idiopathic scoliosis. She experienced anxiety which prevented surgeons from doing the procedure. Psychotherapists used narrative therapy to explore issues associated with...

To educate physicians who are capable of delivering ethical, socially responsible, patient-centered care, there have been calls for identifying curricular space for reflection on the human and societal dimensions of medicine. These appeals, however, beg the question: What does it mean to devote space in an otherwise busy curriculum for these types...

Disclosure on ClosureBowed head swallows truthShared secrets loud and clearUncertain unwavering calmTo quench sereDried and withered. http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/sere sufferingShared secrets loud and clearWeightless, heavy in the airTo quench sere sufferingCompassion cloaks questionsWeightless, heavy in the airTruth, suspended, flicke...

Introduction. Educating students in a multi-cultural society is a challenge as teachers, students and the community they serve all tend to represent various social groups. Skills alone are not adequate for competency in understanding cultural aspects of consultations. A combination of knowledge, skills and attitude is the most widely accepted curre...

Home-based care volunteer (HBCV) identity and how it is shaped was the main focus of the study. Fifteen HBCVs were interviewed about their work and personal life stories and then interviewed reflectively using a narrative interviewing style. Specific attention was paid to contextual meta-narratives and social field narratives in understanding the w...

In traditional Zulu communities, caregiving is rooted in compassionate and hardworking personal identity precepts and the traditional identity expectations of women. Home-based-care volunteerism in the community represents the performance of this identity. Data from a series of interviews with 15 home-based care volunteers (HBCVs), in a rural commu...

What are the processes through which researchers understand context and its value in the qualitative research process? This is an important question for researchers to consider and is especially pertinent in non-Western environments where Western research precepts have traditionally been followed. This article proposes that continually addressing e...

These two reflective poems emerged from my research on home-based care volunteers caring for terminally ill AIDS patients in rural Kwa-Zulu Natal, South Africa. I found myself overwhelmed by the emancipation offered by qualitative research, particularly when compared with the strict confines of the positivist paradigm that dominates clinical resear...

In this paper we present a single case study of a clinical approach that addresses the needs of parents and their children in psychotherapy. The approach begins by addressing the child's and parent's concerns separately at first by establishing strong therapeutic alliances with each, and then proceeds to address the concerns of the parent-child dya...

During most of the latter part of the last century, South Africa has followed international trends in the training of psychiatrists. Training programmes have become increasingly focused on the neurobiological aspects of psychiatric disorders with less attention being paid to psychotherapy. This is consistent with developments in psychiatric researc...