Otosyphilis: A rare cause of acute bilateral sensorineural hearing loss in a HIV-negative patient.

Bilateral acute hearing loss is rare, and the aetiology is poorly defined. Less common treatable pathologies such as otosyphilis must be part of the differential diagnosis and should be actively excluded. We present a case of a 23-year-old woman who developed acute bilateral hearing loss due to otosyphilis, confirmed on audiometry and laboratory tests. In this article, the CT, MRI and clinical findings are presented and discussed.

Strengthening African health systems through outreach and support and values-driven leadership.

Healthcare systems are complex adaptive systems, requiring a change in leadership style, from the traditional model to collaborative, values-driven leadership (VDL). Family physicians are well positioned to facilitate integration and coordination between levels of care, across specialties and within teams, in partnership with local and district management team members. This short report describes a leadership innovation experience in a rural South African district, where a VDL course was introduced in a district health context to build on a strong tradition of relationship-centred outreach and support aimed at creating a learning health system. The authors reflect on the contribution of family physicians to strengthen team-based capacity building, care coordination and a learning culture aimed at quality improvement from the perspectives of the regional and district hospital environments. A values-based leadership style will enable family physicians to strengthen team-relationships and create organisational environments, which support shared learning and quality improvement approaches. Ultimately this approach should lead to improved health systems.

Enabling Self-Directed Academic and Personal Wellbeing Through Cognitive Education.

BACKGROUND: The international crisis of declining learner wellbeing exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic with its devastating effects on physical health and wellbeing, impels the prioritization of initiatives for specifically enabling academic and personal wellbeing among school learners to ensure autonomous functioning and flourishing in academic and daily life. Research emphasizes the role of self-directed action in fostering wellbeing. However, there is limited research evidence of how self-directed action among school learners could be advanced. AIM: We explore the effectiveness of an intervention initiative that exposes teachers to foregrounding Cognitive Education - the explicit and purposeful teaching of thinking skills and dispositions to learners that would advance self-regulated action - to establish the latent potential of the intervention for assisting learners to develop self-regulating abilities that progressively inspires increased self-directed action. METHOD: We illuminate the qualitative outcomes of an exploratory pilot study with a heterogeneous group of willing in-service teachers from two public primary schools (n = 12), one private primary school (n = 3), and one pre-school (n = 2) in South Africa who received exposure to an 80-h intervention that comprised seven study units. The article delineates the experiences of the teachers concerning their participation in the intervention as reflected in their written reflections, as well as their perceptions about the value of the intervention probed with semi-structured one-on-one interviews after completion of the intervention. RESULTS: The findings revealed that exposure to the intervention holds benefits for equipping teachers with teaching strategies to create classroom conditions that nurture the development of thinking skills and dispositions that are important for self-regulating, and ultimately self-directing academic and personal wellbeing. CONCLUSION: Cognitive Education is a form of strengths-based education that can play an indispensable role in enabling self-directed academic and personal wellbeing among school learners.