Menu
Our Faculty
Beverley Bolton
Beverley is a physiotherapist from Port Elizabeth who divides her time between clinical practice and teaching in the field of chronic pain and healthcare communication. She attained her MScMed in Pain Management through Sydney University and has additional qualifications in Medical Communication Skills training and Motivational Interviewing. She is a founding director of the non-for-profit organisation, Train Pain AcademyNPO, formed to provide collaborative pain education to health care professionals managing acute and chronic pain. Beverley is the South African representative on the Advisory Committee of EACH-International Association for Communication in Healthcare and is currently involved with developing the communication skills curriculum at the new Nelson Mandela Bay University medical school. Beverley is passionate about helping healthcare professionals develop strong and effective therapeutic alliances to enable and empower their patients to lead their valued life.
Romy Parker
Romy Parker is a Professor and Director of the Pain Management Unit in the Department of Anaesthesia and Perioperative Medicine at the University of Cape Town. Professor Parker is the course convenor of the Postgraduate Diploma in Interdisciplinary Pain Management, the first programme of its kind in Africa. She is an experienced physiotherapy clinician working in chronic pain management as part of the Chronic Pain Management interdisciplinary team of Groote Schuur Hospital. Her research focusses on pain, with emphasis on developing and testing mechanism-based treatments relevant to a South African context. She serves as a Councillor for the International Association for the Study of Pain (IASP – African representative), she is the current past-president of PainSA (the South African chapter of IASP), Past-Chair of the Pain, Mind and Movement Special Interest Group of IASP and an Honorary Life Member of the Pain Management Physiotherapy Group of the South African Society of Physiotherapy. Romy was awarded the UCT Distinguished Teacher’s Award for 2019 – the university’s highest honour for teaching.
Jacqui Koep
Jacqui is a clinical physiotherapist and teacher in the fields of chronic pain and healthcare communication. Her clinical work is focused on combining pain management and rehabilitative exercise skills to empower patients and get them moving. She is a founding director of the non-profit organisation Train Pain Academy, formed to provide collaborative pain education and skills-training to health care professionals managing acute and chronic pain in normal clinical practice. She obtained her MSc in Pain Management through Edinburgh University in 2013 and has additional qualifications in Healthcare Communication and Motivational Interviewing. Jacqui has extensive experience doing medico legal assessments and appreciates the opportunity it provides for her to interact with individuals from all parts of South Africa as this deepens her understanding of the challenges faced by people with ongoing pain and disability.
Tory Madden
Tory Madden is a clinical physiotherapist and researcher with a longstanding interest in human health, particularly in the processes that underlie persistent pain and learning. She holds a PhD in pain. She works at the University of Cape Town as a senior lecturer in the Department of Anaesthesia and Perioperative Medicine and the Neuroscience Institute and is involved in Groote Schuur Hospital’s interdisciplinary Chronic Pain Clinic. Tory has taught Pain Sciences to undergraduate and postgraduate physiotherapy students at the University of South Australia and she currently teaches on UCT’s Postgraduate Diploma in Interdisciplinary Pain Management. For Train Pain, Tory teaches on the Pain Interventions course and assists with the Medical Communications course. (Photo by Robyn Walker)
Kerry-Ann Louw
Dr Kerry-Ann Louw is a consultant psychiatrist and senior lecturer at Stellenbosch University. She currently runs consultation-liaison psychiatry services at Tygerberg Hospital. Kerry completed both her undergraduate and postgraduate training at the University of Cape Town obtaining her FC Psych qualification in 2011, MMed in 2012 and MPhil in Liaison Mental Health in 2015. Kerry worked in the Division of Consultation-Liaison Psychiatry at Groote Schuur Hospital from 2011-2016. Her special interests include the complex interactions between psychiatric and medical illnesses, chronic pain, psycho-oncology and women’s mental health. She is part of the Tygerberg Hospital chronic pain management multidisciplinary team.
Melissa Saw
Melissa Saw is a clinical physiotherapist and academic based in Cape Town. Her main passion in clinical physiotherapy is pain management and teaching health professionals how to assist patients in this field. She completed her undergrad BSc physio at UCT. She then went on to complete her postgrad MSc in OA and pain at UCT, her research was based on group interventions to target pain and function. This research yielded 2 published articles and 2 congress presentations. She has completed the Certificate in Pain Management and joined the Train Pain lecturing team in 2017. She also presented numerous CPD activities regarding pain management. Melissa has been involved in teaching both undergrad and postgrad students at UCT and is actively involved in clinical education with undergraduate students at Stellenbosch. She is also the chairperson of the Western Cape’s Pain Management Physiotherapy Group.
Scott Rickard
Scott completed a Medical Honours degree in Exercise Science at the Sport Science Institute of South Africa (1995) in Cape Town before moving to Stellenbosch to study Physiotherapy. After graduating he worked in a private practice in Johannesburg for 5 years. He then relocated to the UK where he was the Professional Lead of the Physiotherapy Division at the University of Hertfordshire.He obtained an additional qualification as a Musculoskeletal Sonographer and completed his MSc degree. During this time, he also worked in the NHS where he scanned patients and performed ultrasound guided injections. Scott returned to South Africa in 2013 and currently splits his time between private practise and a non-profit intermediate care facility/hospice called Bethesda.
Janet Keet
Janet is a physiotherapist in Somerset West with a special interest in pain education for health professionals, as well as for adults, teenagers / children, suffering with persistent pain. Currently she is writing and developing Pain Education Empowerment Programmes (P.E.E.P) for teenagers at Paedspal, Cape Town. She facilitates the Groote Schuur (GSH) Pain Clinic P.E.E.P for adults. She provides community service to an NGO, Masikhule by teaching Physifun, a child exercise intervention for preschool teachers.
Roland van Rensburg
Dr. Roland van Rensburg is a specialist Clinical Pharmacologist in the Department of Medicine at Stellenbosch University and Tygerberg Hospital. He is a core member of the Tygerberg Pain Clinic and is a strong advocate for a multidisciplinary team approach to chronic pain. Roland has numerous publications in the pain field and led an investigatorinitiated study in patients with fibromyalgia syndrome. He is passionate about teaching pain and evidence-based pain management principles in an engaging way. His special interests include drug interactions, complex pain syndromes, evidence-based practice, and pharmacogenetics.
Gaby Prinsloo
Dr. Gaby Prinsloo is a medical doctor, PhD and consultant, with a wealth of experience in clinical medicine, academic research and teaching. She worked at the Sports Science Institute in Cape Town until early 2020, when she moved to the UK. Gaby runs an executive wellness and performance consulting company where she coaches at all levels within an organization, develops and facilitates bespoke workshops and speaks at various conferences. She regularly lectures online at both UCT and Stellenbosch University. While working in SA, she lectured on stress management, physiology and chronic disease on the MPhil Sports Medicine program at UCT. In addition to her medical degree and PhD in Exercise Science, she has a diploma in coaching and is a yoga teacher. She has studied nutrition, meditation, mindfulness, sleep, functional medicine and many other healing modalities which she integrates into an holistic science-driven approach to helping people increase their energy and resilience, optimise their well-being, thinking and performance.
Linda Hiemstra
Linda has worked as an Occupational Therapist, both internationally and locally, since 2003 and has experience in the public and private sectors in a wide variety of disciplines, including orthopaedics, general medicine, geriatrics, neurology, spinal and vocational rehabilitation.
She started her current practice in 2010 and it continues to grow. Her practice forms part of the interdisciplinary team at PAIN, where she forms part of the rehabilitation leadership.
She is passionate about providing quality, holistic service which is in the best interest of the patient, and enjoys providing scientifically sound patient education. Seeing patients realise their own potential and grow into their best lives is what makes being an Occupational Therapist so rewarding.
Stian le Roux
Stian is a physiotherapist who is passionate about person-centred healthcare. He works in musculoskeletal health covering sport, occupational health, and chronic pain. He is a faculty member at the Train Pain Academy, assisting in courses, marking, and tutorials in the field of pain physiology and healthcare communication. He is also involved at Nelson Mandela University’s School of Medicine as a facilitator in the Clinical Communication module.
Stian has presented at various Pain SA events and has completed many post-graduate training modules, most notably the Orthopaedic Manipulative Therapy Course (SASP), Certificate in Pain Management (Train Pain Academy) and Motivational Interviewing Fundamentals (Miller, Rollnick and Moyers).
