Thomas Aldersley

I am a medical doctor, MPH (epidemiology and biostatistics) graduate and an early-career researcher with an interest in children’s heart disease and digital health. My main area of study is congenital heart disease (CHD) a common condition affecting 9 per 1,000 live births, and which contributes significantly to the global burden of disease. Although effective, CHD treatment is seldom curative, and patients require long-term follow-up. These patients are particularly vulnerable to gaps in care during the period of transition from paediatric to adult health services. Internationally these care gaps are primarily driven by patient factors. Although largely unstudied in the Southern African context, clinical experience suggests that process-related characteristics of care delivery, have a larger role to play here. I am interested in leveraging the power of digital health: in patient education, reducing staff workloads, increasing efficiency, to address both the patient-related and health-systems factors associated with discontinuity of care in this vulnerable population. I current focus is the PROTEA project, a multicentre congenital heart disease (CHD) registry and DNA biorepository. The PROTEA project currently enrols from three tertiary hospitals in Cape Town, South Africa and one tertiary hospital in Windhoek, Namibia. In addition the project is multidisciplinary and involves both paediatric and adult cardiologists, cardiac surgeons, nursing staff, cardiac technicians, and geneticists among others. These individuals all have different priorities and agendas which differ from region to region. However, I am a confident and able communicator and am able to use these skills to facilitate open dialogue between stakeholders, arrange and chair regular planning and progress meetings, and to ensure that project deliverables are met. I have a keen interest in electronic and digital health. I contributed to the rationale, design and implementation of the PROTEA registry and electronic health record (EHR). I am responsible for all data queries from the database and have created a number of reports in R, Excel, and Power BI. I perform much of the statistical programming for the Division of Paediatric Cardiology using R and Python. I believe that health care data will enable discoveries to improve lives. I hope to work towards consolidating person-level clinical data across disparate South African government services and to leverage this data to improve patient experiences and outcomes. Adolescents with CHD transitioning to adult care are an important target for research and intervention. Adolescents with CHD are at risk of care gaps that will increase morbidity and mortality and undermine the advances made in early surgical and medical treatment. What’s more, this population is an ideal pilot group for future broader interventions.