Walk through the front doors of Medi Response and the first sign you see says: life matters and people come first.
Annastacia Wainaina sits down with Saul, global CEO of Medi Response, an organisation delivering pre-hospital emergency care and aeromedical evacuation across the world. His teams run ambulances across South Africa, staff mining, oil and gas sites, and operate in hostile environments including Iraq and Afghanistan.
This is leadership shaped by life and death.
Saul explains why AI belongs in the medical pack as a tool rather than as the decision maker, and why his clinicians are told to fall back on their training and double check what the algorithm suggests. He describes the escalation pathways where questioning a decision is commended, not punished.
He speaks honestly about mental health in emergency care, and how the belief that a practitioner who cries after a scene is weak had to be dismantled. He argues that culture cannot be taught, only cultivated, and that empathy must run from the executive all the way to the person taking the rubbish out at the gate.
Then he shares the two stories that made him. The man trapped under a heavy vehicle who died the moment it was lifted, and the lesson that you can prepare every step and still not control the outcome. And the baby he delivered in an ambulance, now an adult walking past him years later.
His closing advice: go back to basics, build the foundations, and remember that if you are the most clever person in the room, you're in the wrong room.
Find Medi Response at mediresponse.co.za
The Human Edge Podcast explores what it really takes to lead, care and create change at the edge of human possibility.