A teaching hospital and medical school in one

We discover, we treat, we train — from one campus in the Cape Winelands.

For more than a century, Stellenberg has united a working teaching hospital with a school of medicine. Every patient seen here helps train the next generation. Every researcher works steps from the wards.

Cape Town, South Africa Main campus & teaching hospital
43 specialties Across medicine, surgery, and allied health
4,300 students Undergraduate, postgraduate, doctoral
Three missions, one institution

Care, research and education live under one roof — and one budget.

Care

A 980-bed teaching hospital serving Cape Town and the Western Cape. Emergency medicine, cardiology, oncology, paediatrics, neurology, transplant. Patients come for treatment; clinicians come for the cases they cannot see elsewhere.

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Research

Nineteen named research centres span TB drug resistance, HIV, cardiovascular medicine, infectious disease, neuroscience, and clinical AI. Active grants from the SAMRC, the NRF, Wellcome, the NIH, the Gates Foundation, and EDCTP.

Research themes

Education

Six-year MBChB, intercalated BSc, twenty-one postgraduate programmes, two doctoral schools, and a network of fellowships across our partner hospitals. We train doctors, scientists, midwives, paramedics and pharmacists.

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1.2M
Patient visits
FY 2024-25 across all sites
4,300
Students trained
UG, PG and doctoral candidates
820
Papers published
Peer-reviewed, 2024 calendar year
R890M
Grants won
External funding, last 24 months
Why a teaching hospital is different

The lab is upstairs from the ward. The medical student is sitting in the corner. The consultant is also the principal investigator. This is how medicine moves forward.

Discoveries made on Tuesday morning in a research lab can change how a registrar treats a patient on Wednesday afternoon. A student watching that registrar will, in seven years, be the one running the trial.

This proximity is the entire point. It is what separates an academic medical centre from either a hospital or a university alone. It is what we exist to do.

Dr Aaliyah Khan and the TB Centre team at work on the drug-resistance assay · Photo: Stellenberg Communications
Featured breakthrough

A new pathway in drug-resistant tuberculosis, mapped at the Stellenberg TB Centre.

Pre-XDR tuberculosis currently presents only when first-line treatment has already failed. Our team has identified a resistance signature that can be flagged from a single sputum sample, weeks earlier in the patient journey.

The four-year prospective study, published in Nature Microbiology last month, followed 8,400 patients across six provincial TB clinics. Early identification let clinicians switch regimens before resistance broadened. The protocol is now being adopted by the Western Cape Department of Health and three SADC partner programmes.

Dr Aaliyah Khan Director, Stellenberg Centre for Tuberculosis Research
Read the full study
In their own words

Students, researchers and clinicians on why they came here.

All stories
“I came to Stellenberg because I wanted to be trained on the conditions I would actually meet in practice. By third year I had seen and managed cases my friends overseas only read about.”
Lerato Mthembu
MBChB, Year 4
“I left a chair in Oxford because Stellenberg is one of the few places where bench research, clinical practice and population health sit in the same building.”
Prof. Yusuf Patel
Director, Institute for Population Health
“My Stellenberg training prepared me for the hardest cases. I run a rural district hospital in the Eastern Cape and I am still reaching for what I learned on those wards.”
Dr Sipho Ndlovu
Stellenberg alumnus · Class of 1999
In partnership with
SAMRCSouth African Medical Research Council
NRFNational Research Foundation
WellcomeResearch funder
NIHNational Institutes of Health
GatesBill & Melinda Gates Foundation
EDCTPEuropean & Developing Countries Clinical Trials
From the campus

News and upcoming events.

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Find your route in

Six things you can do from this page in the next fifteen seconds.

Apply

Undergraduate medicine, postgraduate programmes, doctoral schools, fellowships and CPD. Entry routes for South African, SADC and international students.

Admissions

Refer a patient

Clinicians can refer to any of our 43 specialties through the consultant directory or our 24-hour referral line.

Referral portal

Find a clinician

Search the directory by name, condition, or speciality. Patient appointments, second opinions, and outpatient bookings.

Directory

Partner with us

Industry collaborators, NGOs, government health authorities, and international institutions running joint research or training programmes.

Partnerships

Support us

Philanthropy, scholarships, endowed chairs and named research funds. The Stellenberg Bursary Fund supports students from under-resourced provinces.

Donate

Careers

Clinical, academic, research and professional posts across the school and the hospital. Recruitment open year-round.

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