Our guests.

Malusi Mtetwa is a co-founder of ParaPodcast and the host who leads the show's research-review segments. An operational paramedic with experience across South Africa, the UAE, Qatar, and Australia, he holds advanced degrees from Durban University of Technology with master's research on work-related stress among paramedics. On the show, Episode 24 turns the microphone on him — twenty years in EMS and insights from his own published paper on navigating work stress.

Dr Clive Sibanda is reported as Director of Emergency Medical Services at the Limpopo Department of Health, with a postgraduate diploma in Emergency Care from the University of Cape Town. He is the author of the book From Soldier to Doctor, chronicling his transition from the military into medicine. His ParaPodcast appearance is candid on leadership, academia, and mental health stigma in African culture.

Charlotte Pillay is a South African paramedic whose career has climbed from frontline road work into EMS leadership. Her ParaPodcast conversation traces that journey — the operational years, the transition into management, and what it takes for practitioners to step into leadership without losing touch with the road.

Benson Kamau is a paramedic currently working with DRK Rettungsdienst Bodensee-Oberschwaben (German Red Cross EMS), describing himself as an Emergency and Disaster Response Specialist with a Kenyan emergency-care background. His ParaPodcast appearance discusses EMS systems and challenges in Kenya from a frontline-and-policy lens spanning two continents.

Paulus Ambunda is Manager of Emergency Services at the MVA Fund of Namibia in Windhoek, with a Bachelor of Emergency Medical Care (Hons) from NUST Namibia and credentials as an AHA ACLS instructor. He has co-authored international research on spinal cord injury and post-crash care. His ParaPodcast appearance covers EMS education, paramedicine in Namibia, and provider wellbeing.

Zintle Martin is a South African paramedic whose path into emergency care ran through real adversity. Her ParaPodcast conversation, From Struggles to Success, is a candid account of fighting for a place in the profession — the setbacks, the persistence, and what her story says to students coming up behind her.

Busisiwe Nkabinde is a South African Emergency Care Practitioner — the highest pre-hospital qualification in the country. After four years working in the UAE to fund her dream, she returned home to qualify, navigating a training system she describes candidly as having segregation built into it. A two-time ParaPodcast guest, her conversations span balancing motherhood with paramedicine and what it takes to belong in EMS without changing who you are.

Andrew Mosiane is a South African paramedic-researcher and lead author of a 2025 Scientific Reports study on mental-health struggles among newly qualified paramedics, co-authored with Patricia McInerney and Simpiwe Sobuwa. His work documents transition shock, burnout, and the case for structured support in South African EMS. His ParaPodcast appearance focuses on leadership lessons and the role of mentorship.

Daniel Tilley is a researcher affiliated with the Department of Emergency Medical Sciences at Cape Peninsula University of Technology, Cape Town. His published work — including 2024 and 2025 papers co-authored with Lloyd Christopher and Navindhra Naidoo — examines EMS responses to deliberate self-harm, suicidality, and suicide in the Western Cape. His ParaPodcast appearance discusses mental health in pre-hospital care.

Seemole Mfeka is a leader in South African Emergency Medical Services who rose from humble beginnings, profiled on ParaPodcast Episode 18 in a conversation on leadership, education and women’s empowerment in EMS.

Dr Magano Akuaake is an Emergency Medicine Specialist at Welwitschia Hospital in Walvis Bay, Namibia, having qualified at Stellenbosch University and completed her FCEM specialty training in 2024. She previously headed the ICU at Oshakati Intermediate Hospital and is co-founder of a digital health platform for African healthcare workers. Her ParaPodcast appearance is noteworthy as a Namibian EM trailblazer building systems from scratch.

Martin Ellis is associated with ETA Medical (Ellis Training Academy) in South Africa and has hosted Adult ECMO Fundamentals courses endorsed by the ECMO Society of South Africa (ECMOSA), most recently in Bloemfontein. His ParaPodcast appearance focuses on ECMO and the rare frontier of pre-hospital critical care.

Arnold Malotana served as CEO of Gauteng EMS and later as Head of Department for the Gauteng Department of Health and Wellness, with a board role at the HPCSA. His ParaPodcast appearance reflects on a career arc from frontline paramedic to senior provincial health leadership.

Dr Alan Batt is an Associate Professor (adjunct) of Paramedicine at Monash University and Queen’s University, originally from Cork, Ireland, and a critical-care paramedic by background. He co-chairs a CAD$1.2 M pan-Canadian Healthcare Excellence Canada programme embedding social prescribing into paramedic services, and led development of Canada’s National Competency Framework for Paramedics. His ParaPodcast appearance ranges across Ireland, Canada, the UK and Australia.

Lloyd Denzil Christopher (MTech EMC, HDipEd) is Head of the Department of Emergency Medical Sciences at the Faculty of Health Sciences, Cape Peninsula University of Technology, and previously chaired the HPCSA’s Professional Board for Emergency Care Practitioners. He co-authored the influential 2019 paper "Emergency Care Education in South Africa" with Simpiwe Sobuwa.

Micah Iduitua is reported as a paramedic in the Accident & Emergency Department at the University of Benin Teaching Hospital (UBTH) in Nigeria, where he has delivered Basic Life Support training through the LifeSavers Initiative for First Aid Education Nigeria. His ParaPodcast appearance discusses EMS organisation and challenges within Nigeria.

Anthony Carr trained in Emergency Medical Care at CPUT and was working operationally in Port Elizabeth when a 2015 crash on the N2 took his right leg — he self-extricated and directed his own pre-hospital care at the scene. He returned to complete his BTech as an amputee and moved into research, serving as a research paramedic on the EPIC Trauma Study improving trauma outcomes across the Western Cape.

Amy Halck is a Senior Lecturer in Health, Education, Policing and Sciences at the University of Staffordshire (UK), originally educated as a paramedic at Durban University of Technology with operational road and HEMS experience. She co-authored a 2024 systematic review on paramedics as researchers. Her ParaPodcast appearance reflects her trajectory from South African operational paramedic to UK paramedic academic.

Nathan Conradie is a South African paramedic and researcher affiliated with the Division of Emergency Medicine at the University of Cape Town, with prior experience in the Gauteng Critical Care Transport Unit and a BTech in Emergency Medical Care from the University of Johannesburg. His published work has shaped national consensus definitions for Critical Care Retrieval Services in South Africa. His ParaPodcast appearance covers critical care, education, entrepreneurship and physical fitness.

Dr Benjamin W. Wachira is an Assistant Professor of Emergency Medicine and EM Programme Director at Aga Khan University, Nairobi, with an MMed (Emergency Medicine) from the University of Cape Town. He is the founding director of the Emergency Medicine Kenya Foundation, past President of the African Federation for Emergency Medicine, and was appointed to Kenya’s National Emergency Medical Care Steering Committee.

Dr Hassan Farhat (MRes, MSc, dual PhD candidate at the University of Sousse and University of Sfax in Tunisia) is a Quality Improvement Mentor at the Hamad Medical Corporation Ambulance Service (HMCAS) in Doha, Qatar. He has published extensively on AI-enhanced Delphi methods for CBRN preparedness and prehospital EMS research in Qatar and the MENA region, and contributed to the FIFA World Cup 2022 prehospital response.

Dr Raveen Naidoo is the Director of Emergency Medical Services & Disaster Medicine at the National Department of Health (Pretoria), South Africa. He has co-authored major workforce and EMS reform studies including "Estimating the emergency care workforce in South Africa" (2021) and "The current state of emergency medical services in South Africa" (2024).

Dr Soman Mudariki is the EMS Medical Director at City of Harare Ambulance in Zimbabwe — the country’s longest-running government-funded EMS system. He co-authored a 2022 Annals of Global Health paper documenting the decline of Zimbabwe’s pre-hospital infrastructure. His ParaPodcast appearance offers first-hand testimony on system collapse and rebuilding research.

Kaleb Lachenicht is Director of EPIC EM and Chief Clinical Officer at ROCKET Air Ambulance in South Africa, working as a HEMS Emergency Care Practitioner with over a decade of teaching experience in emergency medical care and resuscitation. He has co-authored research on snakebite envenomation management and on integrating EMS with palliative care in South Africa.

Dr Oluwatomilayo (Tomi) Omoya (RN, BN(Hon), PhD, MCENA) is an Associate Lecturer at the College of Nursing and Health Sciences, Flinders University, Adelaide. Her recent work includes a 2025 Journal of Palliative Medicine paper qualitatively evaluating a palliative-care education programme for paramedics in South Australia. Her ParaPodcast appearance explores palliative care within paramedicine.

Dharshak Manikandan (Co-founder & CEO) and Shoyab Sheikh (Co-founder & MD) of Qwiklif, a Dubai-headquartered international medical repatriation service founded in 2023. Both have aerospace/aeronautical engineering backgrounds; the company has reportedly completed hundreds of patient transfers since launching operations, including high-profile cases such as a repatriation from Kandahar.

Justin R. Thomas is a South African-trained paramedic (BEMC, University of Johannesburg, 2013) who completed PhD work at the Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine, University of Oxford, researching healthcare systems at international ports of entry. He has held senior EMS leadership roles including Chief of EMS at Afras (Saudi Arabia) and Flight ECP at ER24.

Professors Mike Wells and Lara Nicole Goldstein are emergency-medicine academics at the University of the Witwatersrand. Wells is the developer of the PAWPER tape — a length- and habitus-based paediatric weight-estimation device that outperforms the Broselow tape and is distributed without commercial benefit — and Goldstein is a long-standing co-author on the validation studies and meta-analyses supporting it.

Nokubonga Thomas is the founder of Medical ER Training and Consulting (MERT) in South Africa, holding an undergraduate diploma (2005) and a B-Tech in Emergency Medical Care and Rescue (2006) from Durban University of Technology. Her ParaPodcast appearance — "From Trauma to Triumph" — focuses on her personal journey from trauma into paramedicine.

Dr Simpiwe Sobuwa (PhD, Emergency Medicine) is Senior Lecturer and Acting Head of the Department of Emergency Medical Sciences at Cape Peninsula University of Technology, and serves as Chairperson of the Professional Board for Emergency Care at the HPCSA. He has co-authored influential papers on emergency care education in South Africa (with Lloyd Christopher) and on paramedic mental health (with Andrew Mosiane).

Nicole de Montille is a South African paramedic, lecturer, and clinical governance leader with three decades in EMS. She trained at Technikon Witwatersrand during its paramilitary era, held her first ALS post at Boksburg Fire, and moved into education as a lecturer at Technikon Natal in 2002 — building the rescue training centre at Currie’s Fountain. After years at ER24, she now leads foundational first-year paramedic teaching at Netcare. Her ParaPodcast appearance is candid on EMS education, women in the profession, and provider mental health.

Craig Wylie is an Emergency Care Practitioner and EMS leader with Western Cape Government Health, where he has worked across clinical operations and governance of one of South Africa’s largest public ambulance services. He is also a published pre-hospital researcher — his work on waveform capnography in South African paramedicine features in our Research Reviews. His ParaPodcast conversation goes inside what it takes to run EMS at provincial scale.

Associate Professor Willem Stassen leads pre-hospital and emergency care systems research at the University of Cape Town’s Division of Emergency Medicine. A paramedic by training with a PhD in emergency medicine, he has authored dozens of peer-reviewed papers on African EMS systems, serves on editorial boards including the African Journal of Emergency Medicine, and supervises a new generation of African EMS researchers. His ParaPodcast conversation maps how research is transforming emergency medical care across the continent.

Professor Ken Catchpole is a human-factors engineer and the SmartState Endowed Chair in Clinical Practice and Human Factors at the Medical University of South Carolina. His doctoral work studied ambulance siren design, and he went on to lead the study that took Great Ormond Street’s paediatric cardiac surgeons to a Formula 1 pit crew — a redesign of patient handover that cut errors and became one of the most cited examples of cross-industry safety learning. His ParaPodcast conversation covers handovers, hierarchy, cognitive load, and why looking after clinicians is looking after patients.