BONUS: Advancing Global Health Education Through International Partnerships with Firdouza Waggie

• Drawing on her experience as a physiotherapist, Waggie explains why clinical training alone cannot prepare graduates for the complex challenges patients face. She discusses the importance of understanding patients' families, communities and access to health care, as well as breaking down traditional educational silos. She makes the case for introducing collaborative learning early in training so future physicians, nurses and other health professionals understand one another's roles and can work together effectively.
• Waggie describes why universities must look beyond clinical education and consider whether their teaching and scientific work address the priorities of the communities they serve. She emphasizes engaging community members early, listening to their needs and co-creating solutions. She also explores how unemployment, food insecurity, housing and safety influence health outcomes, reinforcing the need for professionals who can address challenges that extend beyond any single discipline.
• As co-leader of the conference's Health Professions Education working group, Waggie identifies opportunities for collaboration in faculty development, interprofessional learning, simulation, digital education, curriculum development and program evaluation. She discusses what the two institutions can learn from their different health care environments and the value of moving beyond traditional Global North–Global South knowledge sharing. The conversation concludes with opportunities to expand postgraduate education, joint degree programs and training capacity for the next generation of health professions education scholars.

[00:00:01]Rob Murphy, MD: Are you interested in making a difference in global health? Northwestern University's online Master of Science in Global Health, or MSGH, program prepares professionals to tackle healthcare challenges around the world. With flexible coursework, expert faculty, and hands-on experience, you can build skills to make a lasting impact.The MSGH program includes a flexible one-, two-, or more year option, and all candidates are offered an in-country experience in a global setting. There is also a nondegree certificate program that consists of just taking four courses. Find out more at sps.northwestern.edu. Welcome to a special edition of Explore Global Health, coming to you from the 2026 Stellenbosch University–Northwestern University Global Health Knowledge Hub Conference. My guest today is Associate Professor Firdouza Waggie, executive head of the Department of Health Professions Education at Stellenbosch University.

[00:00:56]Rob Murphy, MD: Her work focuses on how we educate professionals to work across disciplines, with communities, and build more equitable health systems. Here at the conference, she is co-leading the Health Professions Education working group. We are going to talk about her work in health professions education, the challenges and opportunities shaping the field, and how collaboration between Stellenbosch and Northwestern could help prepare the next generation of health professionals. Professor Waggie, welcome to Explore Global Health.

[00:01:24] Firdouza Waggie: Thank you so much.

[00:01:25] Rob Murphy, MD: So you began your career as a physiotherapist before moving into health professions education. What drew you to this field and what did you see in your own experience that made you want to rethink how we prepare people for careers in healthcare?

[00:01:39] Firdouza Waggie: Thank you so much for that question. My journey to health professions education grew out of me being a physiotherapist, first of all, and later of course, I became an educator. As a physiotherapist, I quickly realized that the patient was sitting in front of me is not just a patient that I'm going to be teaching clinically, but for me it was about asking the question, "So where is this patient coming from? Where does the person live? What resources are available for them? What about the patient's family, the community, and the ability to access and navigate the health system?" And then I slowly moved into education and I started asking the question, "Are we preparing our graduates for this reality?" And I think as universities, we are very good at teaching clinical practice or teaching discipline and clinical education. I think that is important, but I started thinking that as practitioners, we cannot function in isolation. I think it's important for graduates to understand the complex health challenges that our patients are facing, and that goes beyond being a doctor or physio or nurse; it really extends beyond that. And so no one discipline or profession can address these complex health challenges. So I then started looking in terms of health professions education: What does it mean? It means then that we need to start perhaps preparing our graduates to be able to collaborate across professional boundaries, to understand the social and health context in which our patients come from, to really listen to our communities and their needs, and also to prepare our graduates to work within a very complex health system. I think that's what motivated me to go into health professions education.

[00:03:20]Rob Murphy, MD: Well, it's not too dissimilar from your co-chair, Dr. Ashti Doobay-Persaud, whose career and profession here at Northwestern is hospital medicine. I mean, she takes care of inpatients only. She's in the Department of Medicine, but she has basically the same philosophy as you in terms of global health education. So it's nice to see the two of you together in this, because I know you're doing a fantastic job. One of your major areas of focus is interprofessional education. We know that taking care of patients requires physicians, nurses, and many other health professionals to work together, but historically, we've often educated them completely separately. How do we start breaking down these silos during training?

[00:04:03]Firdouza Waggie: So I think the starting point is to recognize a fairly simple contradiction: that we expect health professionals to work together after graduation, but still we educate them in silos. And so if collaboration is important for good healthcare, then collaboration cannot simply begin when people enter the workplace. We need to create opportunities for students to learn with, from, and about each other throughout their education. But I also think that we need to move beyond the idea that interprofessional education is simply bringing students—be it medical students, physiotherapy students, nursing students, and other professions—together in the same room. Being together in the same room doesn't automatically mean that they are going to collaborate. So we really need to create authentic, collaborative learning opportunities to solve problems together. The students need to understand the roles of different professionals, and they also need to negotiate boundaries, communicate effectively, and develop a shared responsibility for patient and community outcomes. For me, this is particularly important in an African context, where healthcare resources are a real big issue on the continent. And we have huge resource constraints, and we really have very complex burdens of disease in Africa. And so therefore we cannot afford to have healthcare models where professions are operating in silos; we really have to collaborate, even more so in an African context. So the question I increasingly ask is not only how do we teach students together, but how do we prepare our students for collaborative practice? I think that is an important question with regard to interprofessional education.

[00:05:41]Rob Murphy, MD: Do you find much pushback between people from different healthcare professions?

[00:05:46]Firdouza Waggie: I think we need to overcome that from certain sectors, because we still have a huge hierarchy in medical education where the medical doctor is the dominant profession. So we do have that, but breaking down those perceptions and those silos early on in training can help break those stereotypes and barriers. And I think for us in the faculty, we are really trying to see how we can start working towards a more collaborative practice for our students by looking at programs where we bring students together so they learn with, from, and about each other early in training.

[00:06:26]Rob Murphy, MD: You've also argued that health professions education needs to be socially accountable to the communities that it serves. Tell me about that, and how can involving communities actually change the way we educate future health professionals, both in your country and mine?

[00:06:41]Firdouza Waggie: So for me, social accountability asks a fundamental question: Who are we accountable to? Generally, universities educate health professionals, produce research, and generate knowledge, but ultimately we need to ask whether the work and the research that we're generating is responding to a priority health need of a community and of the health systems that we serve. I think for me it is a fundamental question, and that changes the relationship with the community quite significantly. Rather than the universities deciding what the communities need, we should really be engaging the communities very early on in our conversations when we arrange to do research in those communities. And we really need to start off by listening to what our communities are saying, because we can bring our communities in to co-create solutions. We can work with communities in identifying their priorities, and in doing so, we can then shape our own research questions once we engage with them. In my own work, I have engaged particularly around this, and it is amazing to see how we can really come up with co-created solutions from both the university and the communities. Working in communities, you see that health is connected to unemployment, food insecurity, housing, and safety, and these issues don't necessarily sit within only one profession. It crosses those professional boundaries, and this has major implications for health professions education.

[00:08:17]Rob Murphy, MD: Here at the conference, you're co-leading the Health Professions Education working group with Northwestern's Ashti Doobay-Persaud.  What are some of the challenges or opportunities you want this group to tackle together?

[00:08:30]Firdouza Waggie: I think one of the exciting things about bringing colleagues from Stellenbosch and Northwestern together is that, while our contexts are very different, the questions we share are quite similar. For example, how do we prepare graduates for increasingly complex health systems? How do we meaningfully integrate interprofessional learning into our curricula? Digital technologies and AI are also issues that both Stellenbosch and Northwestern University are grappling with. And then of course, how do we prepare faculty for the changing educational context? I think these are some of the important questions. So there's an enormous opportunity for partnerships such as this one to move beyond a model where knowledge or educational approaches simply flow from the Global North to the Global South. Instead, we can ask what each context can teach the other. For example, Africa has a great deal to contribute to global health professions education, particularly around community-engaged education. I also think in terms of the distributed clinical training that Stellenbosch is involved with as we roll out our new curriculum in our medical faculty, social accountability is another area where Stellenbosch can add to the conversation. Working within a resource-constrained environment such as ours is also really important. So I hope our working group can identify areas of complementary expertise where working together allows us to produce something that neither institution could produce alone.

[00:10:08]Rob Murphy, MD: As this working group and the larger Global Health Knowledge Hub develop, where do you see the greatest potential for Stellenbosch and Northwestern to work together to strengthen health professions education?

[00:10:20]Firdouza Waggie: So I think the greatest potential lies in moving from collaboration based primarily on individual projects to building a long-term platform for shared learning and scholarship in health professions education. There are several areas where I see real possibilities: faculty development, interprofessional practice and collaborative practice, simulation, digital education and innovation, and a growing focus on socially accountable health professions education, curriculum development, and program evaluation. But for me, the exciting part is not simply choosing a topic—it is thinking about how we collaborate. So if you look at those areas, we could co-develop educational innovations and test them across our different health systems. Second, our students and faculty could learn together across our institutions, creating opportunities for early-career academics and postgraduate students from both institutions to develop as health professions education scholars. Lastly, we could build comparative research that asks how context shapes whether our educational interventions work across the two institutions and contexts. That kind of partnership allows us to use our differences as a strength. Stellenbosch brings experience from South Africa and the wider African continent within health professions education, while Northwestern University brings experience from a major academic health system in the United States. Neither context should be treated as a model for the other, as we operate in our own specific environments. Instead, the opportunity is to ask what we can learn from one another and what we can create together that is useful beyond either institution. For me, that would be a very meaningful outcome of this Global Health Knowledge Hub.

[00:12:21]Rob Murphy, MD: One last question. The U.S. government had stopped funding to South Africa, including capacity development and healthcare education training. They have since reinstated that. However, they stopped the training component because the focus for training at the NIH in the U.S. is more on low-income and low-middle-income countries, and South Africa is upper-middle-income. However, they are allowing South Africa to participate as trainers, though not as leads. In our training programs, we would love to expand human capacity development with Stellenbosch University. It is very difficult now to get students from many countries into the United States for a one- or two-year master's or graduate training program, but we hope we can work together to increase capacity in other countries as well.

[00:13:27]Firdouza Waggie: Part of our strategic planning in the Department of Health Professions Education is precisely to look at how we build capacity, specifically around early-career scholars and postgraduate students, developing them in health professions education where there is such a great need for scholarship. Whether we expand our master's and doctoral programs or create opportunities for joint degree programs, this is a key focus for us at Stellenbosch University.

[00:14:04]Rob Murphy, MD: Well, I'm very glad to hear that, because it has been challenging for us to continue. We've had multiple training programs that are difficult to run now with changing regulations, and it would be great to work more closely with you on that. I want to thank Associate Professor Firdouza Waggie, executive head of the Department of Health Professions Education at Stellenbosch University, for joining me today.

[00:14:29]Firdouza Waggie: Thank you very much.

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