Dr Francois Stapelberg is a specialist anaesthetist and Fellow of the Australian and New Zealand College of Anaesthetists. He works in Auckland, New Zealand, in both private and public practice, with a university appointment as clinical senior lecturer at the University of Auckland. He is the clinical lead for burn anaesthesia at the New Zealand National Burn Service.
He has have been involved with burn care since undergraduate days in South Africa, learning how to care for severely injured burn patients in resource constrained environments, from bedside resuscitation to doing skin grafts as a house surgeon. Subsequent to that served as a permanent force officer in the South African Military working in a range of roles from intensive care, anaesthesia and general military and retrieval medicine. He completed specialist training in anaesthesia in New Zealand, and have worked at Middlemore Hospital in Auckland for over 25 years. He was appointed as a Distinguished Clinical Teacher at the University of Auckland in 2016, the first anaesthetist to be awarded this distinction.
He is an EMSB Instructor and Course Director.
Francois was appointed to the ANZBA Board in 2019 as the chair of education, with the brief to re-establish relationships with EMSB partner societies, and to lead the final stages of revising the EMSB 2021 course along with Richard Wong She and the EMSB committee, as well as liaise with the BRC leadership to oversee the delivering of this important course. Since 2019 he has has served on the ANZBA board leading the education courses in Australia and New Zealand through the pandemic. He established the International EMSB Senate which meets virtually twice a year on Zoom (thanks Covid) as well as extended EMSB partner countries to now include Norway, Germany and Hong Kong, with interests of expression from other countries to become involved with EMSB.
Francois is passionate about the burn care education that ANZBA delivers, seeing the difference that education to non-burn clinicians make in the patients we care for. He is proud to follow in the footsteps of giants who have created and left the legacy of these courses, which has gone on to form an important part of burn care education in other jurisdictions.
His goal as president is one of facilitating relationships, which comes naturally to an anaesthetist, whilst recognising the need for teams to work well together. Within our association we have to improve our own communication to members, make sure that their views are heard and included, as well as ensure that our members (and non-members) who freely give their time to education, research and burn care activities feel welcome and valued.
Specific challenges ahead for us is to improve our joint preparedness for disasters, towards which he has already been working to foster the relationship between ANZBA and Australian Defence Force. Further opportunities lie ahead for ANZBA to take a lead in improving the relationships that already exist between state burn services to work together better in the event of mass burn casualties, as well as opportunities to foster multi centre pragmatic research.
“Ehara taku toa i te toa takitahi, engari he toa takitini.” Success is not the work of one, but the work of many.