Lara Fairall is a Professor of Global Healthcare Delivery in the King’s Global Health Institute and School of Life Course & Population Sciences, based in Cape Town, South Africa. She is a doctor with 20 years’ experience in health systems research, health systems strengthening and knowledge translation. She works closely with academics, NGOs and Ministries of Health in several LMICs including South Africa, Ethiopia, Brazil, Nigeria to empower frontline providers, including non-physician clinicians, to provide quality healthcare across the life course.

She co-founded and continues to lead the first Knowledge Translation Unit (KTU) in Africa at the University of Cape Town, where she is an honorary professor in the Department of Medicine. The KTU developed and supports the implementation of the Practical Approach to Care Kit – PACK – which supports primary healthcare workers to deliver evidence-informed care. It is scaled up throughout South Africa (where it is also known as Adult Primary Care) and Ethiopia (where it is known as Ethiopian Primary Health Care Guidelines), being scaled up in Brazil, and piloted across multiple regions of Nigeria and Indonesia. PACK aims to support Universal Health Coverage through capacity development of the primary healthcare workforce.

Her current research interests include trialing a version of PACK optimized for multimorbidity, piloting a version of PACK for adolescents and use of AI to streamline the evidence synthesis processes that underpin PACK.