The 2025 Chronicle

was instrumental in the immediate care and management of many severely injured Michaelhouse boys from the tragic bus crash on Town Hill. After this sad event, he was quoted as fol lows: “Indeed, faith is central to coming through this horrific tragedy. It was a privilege to look after such incredible young men who were unbelievable in their resilience and courage. We saw 20, with two having severe injuries requiring surgery. There was amazing support from the Michaelhouse family, with Housemasters, Rector, governors, teachers, family members and friends coming to offer support. I was emotionally over whelmed and feel prouder than ever to be a part of our Mi chaelhouse family as an Old Boy.” Sandy graduated as a doctor at UCT in 1989 and then returned to KZN to work as an intern at Edendale Hospital in the trou bled times leading up to the democratic elections of 1994. He remembers well the release from prison of Nelson Mandela and was proud to be serving at this important period of South African history. He went abroad to do further studies at Oxford University and the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine in the UK to prepare himself for medical work in remote settings. He took part in various adventures, including cycling the Silk Route with his wife from Islamabad in Pakistan over the Karakoram mountains to Kashgar in China, and then on to Lhasa in Tibet and finally Katmandu in Nepal. During his journey he was in teracting with the locals, visiting health outposts and learning skills and cultural experiences that would benefit him in his lat er humanitarian work. His travels took him to New Zealand and then Australia, where he graduated as an emergency medicine and trauma specialist from the Australasian College for Emergency Medicine. He then started a career that has seen him work in this field globally in high- and low-income countries, including Reykjavik in Iceland, Christchurch in New Zealand, Kassala in Sudan, Cox’s Bazar in Bangladesh, and Cork in Ireland. From his base in New Zealand he volunteered in Papua New Guinea, assisting in the development of emergency medicine there. He has since helped evolve emergency medicine in many places, including Karachi in Pakistan, where he has been a vis iting clinician and lecturer, and back home at Edendale, KZN, where he was instrumental in the creation and development of a thriving emergency department from 2013 to 2017. Earlier, in 2011, he returned to South Africa from New Zealand and took a post as a medical officer at Mseleni Hospital near Mbazwana in north-eastern KZN, where he and his young family thrived in a remote community, revelling in the natural beauty and wilder ness of that part of South Africa, and where he again reorgan ised the emergency department and provided comprehensive clinical care in this remote and challenging environment. After this, he and his family embarked on a six-month voyage of discovery, travelling up through Africa as far as Uganda and Kenya, homeschooling their children and trying to understand better the complexities of the cultures of southern and eastern Africa, as well as exploring and visiting health clinics along the way. During this time Sandy volunteered as a doctor at a small missionary hospital on Lake Kivu in Rwanda, where he assisted with teaching and clinical services. His voluntary medical work has been profound and long lasting, and has extended into the world of sport, which he so loves. He has volunteered as ringside doctor at a boxing tournament in Wales, at interprovincial basketball in Nelson, New Zealand, at a World Triathlon event in Perth, Australia, and for crazy motor

bike stuntmen at Moses Mabhida Stadium in Durban. He has volunteered at the medical tent of the Comrades Marathon on numerous occasions, assisted in the Dusi medical tent, been a cycling medic on the multi-day Joburg-to-Sea and Sani-to-Sea mountain bike races, and run in the London Marathon to raise funds for the Great Ormond Street Hospital for children. Sandy has always been involved in teaching and improvement in the care of medical and trauma emergencies. He was a vis iting lecturer at the Nelson Mandela medical school in Durban, and an examiner for the South African diploma in primary health care and emergency medicine. In Australasia he was an instructor in emergency life support, and over all his career has been an instructor in Advanced Trauma Life Support, a world wide trauma system improving the care of severely injured patients. Most recently he was a volunteer instructor in Cape Town while on vacation there. He has also been an instructor in the use of ultrasound and in advanced paediatric life sup port. Recently he was very busy in the clinical supervision and teaching of doctors in Gaza, assisting them in their clinical work during the war there. Sandy’s career has included time in numerous high-income countries, as alluded to earlier, and it has been in these places that he has learned the skills of his trade and the recent devel opments in emergency medical and trauma care. But it is in the low-income and remote contexts that he has thrived and where his heart has been – whether that was Mseleni in remote KZN, Edendale Hospital in Pietermaritzburg, his first job in New Zea land in the small coastal town of Kaitaia, or at a mission hospi tal on the banks of Lake Kivu in Rwanda. But mostly, and more recently, he has been recognised for his humanitarian work for the ICRC. Firstly, in Cox’s Bazar in southern Bangladesh, where the Rohingya from Myanmar are trapped in one of the world’s largest refugee camps and where Sandy assisted in the development of comprehensive emergency department and medicine training. Then to Kassala in eastern Sudan, coinciding with the Ethiopian Tigray crisis, where Sandy designed and renovated the emergency depart ment in the local hospital, greatly contributing to the improve ment of emergency care there. Periods at ICRC headquarters in Geneva and then teaching in Amman, Jordan, also assisted in the global humanitarian effort. And then finally, in 2024, he worked multiple six-week rotations in Rafah in southern Gaza, among the horrors of the Israe li-Hamas war, where he has been closely involved in leading the building, management and clinical supervision of a 62-bed ICRC field hospital that has provided life-saving care to thou sands of injured and sick Palestinians. The hospital’s outpa tients’ department sees up to 400 people pass through it a day, and the emergency department dealt with 30 casualties in an hour recently, during a mass-casualty incident. While working in the turmoil of war, he lived under basic conditions, lacking the comforts we know, emphasizing his selflessness and desire to help where needed most. With the frontline a short distance away, Sandy reported to the Witness newspaper: “Sometimes, in the tents, you can feel the impact of the explosions. Then you hear the sirens. Then the patients come.” Sandy moved back to the ICRC in Geneva in 2025 to oversee the global management of emergency care at that organisation. From quiet beginnings in Farfield in the early 1980s to the ICRC in Geneva, it has been a varied, exciting and selfless journey of

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