Hanlie Myburgh

Hanlie Myburgh

  • PhD Fellow

Hanlie Myburgh is a PhD candidate in Medical Anthropology at the University of Amsterdam and Researcher at the Desmond Tutu TB Centre, Stellenbosch University, South Africa. Her research interests are focused at the intersection of anthropology and public health, with two intersecting foci: 1) health service delivery and patient-provider relationships in the context of chronic infectious disease (e.g., shifts from conventional paternalistic modes of service delivery towards person-centered approaches to care); and 2) health services as microcosms of the broader historical and social contexts of which they are a part.

In her PhD project, she draws on data and insights from more than a decade of work on HIV/TB, programme implementation, and related health interventions to explore South Africa’s implementation of the shift in global HIV policy towards one that propounds an HIV ‘treat all’ approach. Her analysis focuses on how global HIV directives and priorities that propound a hope for and urgency to achieve an end to HIV create responsibilities for national governments, frontline health workers, people living with HIV, and community members in a global HIV response. She uses a ‘responsibilisation’ framework to describe how these directives and responsibilities cascade down to different health systems actors and to explain how they are potentially transformed as they meet intensely local contexts and priorities.

A central ambition in her health-related research is to translate ethnographic insights and findings into practicable results in low- and middle-income health services contexts. In doing so, she wants to inform the delivery of programmes and services in ways that minimise, rather than reproduce, societal inequalities and challenges.