The Rural Health Conference is an vibrant event bringing together doctors, therapists, nurses, clinical associates, health students and NGOs. Always in a rural location! Regular RHC goers love to meet up and share ideas and friendship  with colleagues from around South Africa and Africa.  New RHC goers are usually "blown away" by the energy and interest generated at the conference.
Find out more!
Read about our Key Note Speakers below
RHC2022 Gillian Saloojee Dr. Gillian Saloojee is a paediatric physiotherapist with a special interest in working with children and young adults with cerebral palsy (CP) and their families living in rural resource-constrained settings. Promoting access to quality intervention and excellent services for all children and young adults with CP, irrespective of where they live, has been the driving force behind her work. She is the Founder and former Executive Director of Malamulele Onward, the current Chairperson of the Southern African Academy of Childhood Disability and an honorary senior lecturer in the Physiotherapy Department at the University of the Witwatersrand.
RHC2021 Lidia Pretorius Ms Lidia Pretorius’s career over the past 30 years has transcended working as a frontline rehabilitation therapist, a social justice activist, a full-time politician as Deputy Executive Mayor, a public policymaker, a rural development practitioner, and lately, disability empowerment consulting and life coaching. Career highlights have included supporting the establishment of the Disability Programme in The Presidency (2015), as well as participatory drafting of the Disability Rights Charter (1992), the White Paper on an Integrated National Disability Strategy (1996/7), the Promotion of Equality and Prevention of Unfair Discrimination Act (1998/99) and the White Paper on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (2015/16). She was instrumental in drafting South Africa’s Baseline Country Report on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities to the United Nations and has participated in several international conferences on the rights of persons with disabilities.
RHC2019 Bongiwe Zuma  is a Senior Advocacy Officer. Bongi is from rural Estcourt, KZN, is disabled herself as well as being the mother of a child with a disability. She trained as a Community Rehabilitation Facilitator (CRF) at the Institute of Urban Primary Care (IUPHC) for 2-years during 1996 – 1997. She joined Sarah Rule in Pietermaritzburg in 1999 as the 1 st CBR trainer and has worked for CREATE for 20 years. She had wide experience in training CRFs until 2006, when training was terminated by the Health Professions Council of South Africa (HPCSA). In 2000 she was involved in developing the CBR training manual for community health workers and facilitators at Valley Trust, KZN as well as a 3- month training for the National Alliance for Child Care Workers (NACCW) to work with children with disabilities. Her work on training for human rights based on the Convention on Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) started in 2008. She has been involved in enabling mainstream NGOs in KZN to shift from CBR to disability-inclusive development since 2012. She has had a focus on training traditional leaders in access for justice for people with disability, gender-based violence, inclusion of children with disability in Early Childhood Development (ECD) and is currently involved in conducting workshops on disability rights with traditional leaders in rural areas as well as supporting groups of rural parents of children with disabilities. She is the Chairperson of the Human Rights Committee in KZN and is about to graduate as a Paralegal Officer. Her present work includes the Impendulo (meaning to reply) project (focused on access to justice in traditional courts for people with disability in rural areas) and the Khulumani Collective (focused on land and health rights for marginalised groups) funded by the European Union, EIDHR.
RHC2018 Maryke Bezuidenhout is a physiotherapist, Head of Rehab at Manguzi Hospital KZN, and current Chair of RuReSA. She received a standing ovation for her keynote speech on Rural Proofing the Future Generation of Professionals. Never one to shy away from issues and controversy she highlighted that without changing the way we educate health students we will not create the type of clinicians we need working rural - people that have been exposed to the intersectoral problem solving needed in rural and who value multidisciplinary team work .
RHC2017 Prof Shakile Dada: Participation: Is it enough to be present?
Shakila Dada  is a speech-language pathologist and has many years’ experience in training and implementing Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC) in the South African context as well as postgraduate training in AAC implementation. Her research and publications concern augmentative and alternative communication interventions with a particular focus on the role of graphic symbols in language learning and extending participation of persons with disabilities. Her broader focus lies with ensuring participation of persons who use AAC, and their families when providing interventions.
RHC2016 Prof Steve Reid: Health, Ability, Resilience and Well-being in rural areas: a different perspective on caring
Steve Reid is a Family Physician with extensive experience in rural clinical practice, education and research. He started a vocational training programme for rural doctors in Durban, and was a founder member of the Rural Doctors Association of SA. At the University of KwaZulu-Natal he started the Centre for Rural Health and  In 2010 he took up the post of Glaxo-Wellcome Chair of Primary Health Care at the University of Cape Town, where he has led teaching and research in primary health care, distributed learning, human resources for health, and medical humanities. Steve said he is honoured to have have a "promotion to rehab"!
RHC 2015 Prof Claire Penn: Ethical issues for multidisciplinary health teams : Ensuring humane health care
Claire  has a deep interest in rural Africa, and is an A-rated speech and language pathologist and one of the world leaders in the field of linguistics, sign language, child language, aphasia and head injury. Her interest in the complexities of human communication has seen her produce ground-breaking research. In Claire's career in speech pathology she has worked in  the Department of Speech Pathology and Audiology at Wits, was a British Council scholar at New Addenbrookes Hospital, England;  a visiting research fellow in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Macquarie in Sydney;  senior research specialist a t the Human Sciences Research Council; and then a consultant to various international institutions. 
RHC 2014: Jean Elphick: Community-based Rehabilitation: A viable strategy for catalysing collective agency and learning from our clients in rural health settings
 Jean is a development-orientated Physiotherapist with specialization in at the assessment and management of children with Cerebral Palsy. Her interests have grown beyond clinical work into social justice and human rights, public health and development. She has overseen the operationalisation of the pilot of the Programme in Orange Farm. As part of this Afrika Tikkun Empowerment Programme: Children with Disabilities and Their Families and annual event called the Child Protection + Disability Dialogue, to promote the equitable extension of child protection and justice to children with disabilities. See Jean's keynote address on YouTube - there are 2 speakers and Jean is 1 hour in.
RHC 2013: Sarah Rule: Health, Rehabilitation and the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. Sarah is a Speech Therapist and director of CREATE, KZN which she founded. See the slides of her presentation
RHC2012 Harsha Dayal RuReSA was started as a new volunteer group in 2011 so Harsha was our first key note speaker!
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