10th Man
MD

Dr. Bruce Strover is a Specialist Anaesthesiologist and Critical Care Physician with 25 years of experience across five continents. He graduated from the University of Cape Town in 1998 and has spent his career in the places where medicine is hardest — remote islands, offshore mining operations, conflict-adjacent environments, and under-resourced rural hospitals during crises the rest of the world was watching from a distance.

He has served as Chief Medical Officer for a WHO/UN COVID ICU in Ghana, Head of ICU and Anaesthesia at a NATO Role 2B Damage Control Hospital in Kosovo, national COVID-19 adviser to the Maldivian government — where he recommended reopening against global consensus and was proven right — and is currently Head of Department at Al-Najaf Al-Ashraf Teaching Hospital in Najaf, Iraq, under Gruppo San Donato, one of Europe's largest hospital groups.

His postgraduate specialist training was under Professor David Morrell — former Head of Department at Wits University, pioneer of low-flow anaesthesia, SASA OVS Kok Award 2018 — alongside whom he spent twenty years in Johannesburg, Port Elizabeth and East London. His undergraduate mentor was Professor John Knottenbelt, one of Southern Africa's foremost emergency physicians and NHS Lifetime Achievement Award recipient. He completed an orthopaedic knee fellowship under his uncle, Mr Angus Everett Strover FRCS — internationally recognised pioneer of ACL reconstruction and founder of the Droitwich Knee Clinic.

Throughout his undergraduate years at UCT — 1992 to 1998 — he assisted his father Roger in theatre three times a week, full operating slates, and had supper with his parents almost every evening. Six years of watching one of Cape Town's finest plastic surgeons work, from the beginning of his medical education. The same transmission that had run from Minto to Roger now ran from Roger to his son.

He holds a Fellowship of the College of Anaesthesia, a Masters in Occupational Health and Safety (EQF Level 8), a Diploma in Anaesthesia, and certification as a Dive Medical Officer. He has 200+ hours of aeromedical flight time with intubated patients and is a qualified SEA-PHECC Aeromedical instructor. He is Night Vision certified.

He is a fifth-generation physician. His father Roger Strover FRCS was a plastic surgeon and ex-Head of Department at Groote Schuur Hospital, trained by Sir Archibald McIndoe — pioneer of reconstructive surgery for burned RAF pilots in the Second World War — and co-founder of the Cape Melanoma Clinic. His grandfather Minto Strover MB ChB served as the only doctor across 30,000 square miles of Rhodesia for decades, published on snake-bite treatment, and did not send out bills for five years during a drought because he hadn't the heart to.

He is, by design and by temperament, the tenth man.