Stellenbosch University
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New head of anaesthesiology brimming with ideas for department
Author: FMHS Marketing & Communication / FGGW Bemarking & Kommunikasie - Tyrone August
Published: 11/08/2020

Prof Sean Chetty was appointed Executive Head of Stellenbosch University's Department of Anaesthesiology and Critical Care in mid-April, just as the Covid-19 virus was beginning to spread more rapidly in South Africa.

As a result, he immediately found himself tackling various tasks at the same time. "I'm very aware that my new job means that I need to be juggling a couple of balls," Chetty acknowledges. "The one is that I need to be managing the Department within this crisis. But, at the same time, I need to be planning for after this crisis.

"It will be a disaster if future plans are left until the crisis is over because we'll end up with a situation where we get to the end of this pandemic, [and then] there will be a vacuum because nothing was planned."

Chetty's strategic plans for the Department are based on six pillars that he presented when he was interviewed for his new position: teaching and learning, research, social impact, transformation, people development and external relations. "Everything else that I developed is based on those six pillars," he adds.

Within this framework, a key objective is to position the Department to cope with new challenges within the field. "At the moment, Anaesthesiology and Critical Care is a single department in the Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences," Chetty explains.

"Yet anaesthesiology has vastly grown from when it was first developed, and certainly from when the structure of our faculty was formed. In the past, it was just the work within the theatre environment and anaesthetising patients. Globally, that has grown a lot to become multifaceted.

"Anaesthesiology now includes critical care, peri-operative medicine (which is really new and exciting, and one of the areas I want to develop for the Faculty and the Department), pain medicine and what we know as anaesthesia services. In the Stellenbosch University environment, I'm hoping to develop these four distinct areas of interest within Anaesthesiology."

Some progress has already been made in this direction. Before he took up his present position, Chetty was interim head of 3CU, which incorporates three critical care structures within Tygerberg Hospital. "This will hopefully be the precursor to a critical care medicine division in the faculty," he says.

Chetty points out that he has a particular interest in pain medicine. In fact, he declares, developing this field is why he joined Stellenbosch University in the first place from the University of the Witwatersrand four years ago: "While it's quite a mature field internationally, pain medicine is a new and exciting field within South Africa.

"It's one of the few fields that fall distinctly into anaesthesiology: pain management is a huge part of what anaesthesiologists do. The part that is underdeveloped in South Africa is chronic pain." Chetty estimates that there are probably only around 10 clinicians in the country that have significant experience in managing patients with chronic pain or in performing interventional pain management procedures.

And yet chronic pain, he notes, can have a devastating impact on patients and the health system, and, more generally, on the economy: "We already have a chronic pain service at Tygerberg Hospital. My intention is to expand this to enable more training and to develop a research programme around that."

Another research and training stream that he intends to develop is within cardiac anaesthesia: "One of the strong areas in our Department is the expertise in this field. I'd like to harness that experience so that we can engage in a robust research programme to improve patient care in this field.

“My personal interest within the anaesthetic portfolio is in obstetrics anaesthesia. My PhD [at the University of the Witwatersrand in 2016] was in the field of obstetrics anaesthesia and pain management for these patients. There is a huge area we can develop here."

In addition, Chetty believes the international network he has built up since he entered the profession in 2003 will be invaluable in this process. (Just before he took up his current position, he was a research fellow at Harvard Medical School and the Massachusetts General Hospital in the United States.)

He is excited about peri-operative medicine as well: "This is an emerging field globally. It is going to revolutionise the practice of anaesthesiology, and is certainly something that I want us to develop a strong research and training platform in within the next five years."

But, as his six pillars indicate, Chetty's strategic plans extend way beyond the campus. "As a university, we serve not just to train the people that are here, but also to contribute to the training within our greater community," he states. "And for us that's the eastern metro of Cape Town and most of the eastern part of the Western Cape Province."

The department has already started anaesthesiology training at smaller regional hospitals: "That is part of the social impact that I want to see for the department; that we don't just train and develop people from within, but also look after the greater community outside."

Another aspect Chetty identifies as a key priority among his strategic plans is transformation: "Anaesthesia has traditionally been a very poorly transformed discipline. This department has made a lot of progress, both in terms of gender and racial equity.

"But we're not where we need to be; we certainly don't represent the demographics of the country. We need to improve that. Together with Tygerberg Hospital and its employment equity targets, I think we're making really good inroads. We need to be a department that is representative of the population that we serve.

"And, with that, we need to grow academically from within those previously marginalised groups. We have to look after our people, both in terms of job satisfaction and in terms of academic development."

Chetty is clearly passionate about his chosen area of specialisation – he describes anaesthesiology as a beautiful melding of science and art – and is brimming with ideas on how to expand its reach and increase its impact. "We have massive potential," he says. "There's so much we can improve on; there's so much we can do."


Photo credit: Damien Schumann