The Prestige List
Neurosurgeon
Meet Dr Coceka Mfundisi (38). When she is not in her theatre scrubs saving lives, she is busy advocating for better healthcare for patients, improved working conditions for her colleagues, and general awareness on issues affecting medical teams in hospitals, clinics and care centres around South Africa.
Coceka, as she prefers to be called, is a specialist neurosurgeon with a private practice based at Busamed Modderfontein Private Hospital, treating both adults and children.
With Covid-19 having ripped through much of the world and made it dangerous for most to even step outside, Dr Mfundisi and her colleagues have been the ones at the forefront of doing their jobs of saving lives, while keeping COVID-19 at bay from their patients and themselves. Most noticeably she is one of a very few medical professionals who have been upfront and brave enough to speak truth to power every day to politicians and administrators about the working conditions of medical staff, and situations at hospitals across South Africa.
With an unprecedented dependence on online media for information and online media being flooded with dangerous, misleading fake news and inflammatory misinformation campaigns against COVID vaccinations programmes, she has also emerged as one of the most trusted voices online. Scores of her online community look to her to provide clarity and credible advice on new and emerging medical information around COVID-19 and the vaccination programme, and every day she answers all our questions with patience and care.
After graduating from the University of Cape Town (UCT) with a Bachelor of Medicine and Bachelor of Surgery degree, she completed training as a specialist neurosurgeon with the College of Medicine of South Africa, and became the second
Black woman to be admitted as a fellow of the College of Neurosurgeons of South Africa. She also holds a Master of Medicine in Neurosurgery from the University of Pretoria, which makes her the first woman to qualify as a neurosurgeon from the University of Pretoria in its more than 100-year history.
Some of her achievements include receiving the DVC award at UCT, receiving the Goldman Sachs Global Leadership award, and featuring in the Mail & Guardian Women Changing South Africa edition of 2019. She is currently a member of the Fifth Medical Committee of preliminary enquiry of the HPCSA.