Brief profile
Roché Steyn has qualifications as indicated above. His research, teaching and practice have involved: malpractice law applied in medicine and psychology; multidisciplinary project management; multinational criminal law and the law of delict/tort; legal (forensic) psychology; industrial psychology; health psychology and integrative medicine. Professionally applied English has been a strong feature in his endeavours in those areas, and this aspect has been incorporated into his current teaching. Through his various activities, he continues to develop holistic perspective on key interactions between law, medicine, psychology and management. His research in the area of integrative medicine is currently being expanded through his work for the Malie Fourie Foundation and in the Preventive Integrative Medicine division of Multiplin. For further information regarding his services on legal cases involving medicine or psychology, see the Medicine and Law and Psychology and Law divisions of Multiplin.


Further Background Information
Roché Steyn started his professional education at the University of Pretoria in South Africa with simultaneous studies in law and psychology, integrating the requirements for undergraduate psychology with the requirements for undergraduate law. His aim was interdisciplinary study right from the start. His efforts earned him the BLC degree (with additional courses in psychology and criminology). During that time he started working (and then continued to work part-time throughout his studies) as a freelance editor, inter alia editing a number of MBA dissertations and the Strategic Management Plan for the Department of Welfare and Population Development. (Two of the courses on which he currently teaches are Professional English Skills and Advanced Writing Skills.) Following his BLC, he embarked on a combination of the LLB degree and Honours degree in psychology, having been granted permission to complete these degrees simultaneously.

He then went on to combine studies in medical law (focusing on malpractice liability in clinical psychology and psychiatry) and management, completing the LLM degree and the Advanced Diploma in Project Management. He was awarded the Carmen Nathan Grant of the Unit for Medicine and Law of the University of Pretoria and Unisa to conduct research in the United States for the purpose of his LLM. The simultaneous completion of the LLM and the AdvDipPM allowed him to incorporate selected principles of project management into his LLM work (in the shape of HMM). He achieved distinctions in each of the requirements for the LLM (one of which was a single-session oral examination in medical law, criminal law and the law of delict with a panel of five distinguished professors, including Prof SA Strauss SC and Prof CR Snyman). He obtained both the AdvDipPM and the LLM cum laude.

By the time of completing the above-mentioned programmes (2002), the development of Multiplin had already begun (in collaboration with Christopher Woodrow and Hilary Anderson), and he had become involved in some consulting in South Africa. Upon arrival in the United Kingdom in 2003, he started teaching part-time at the University of Leicester (where he taught medical law, tort law, and criminal law), while continuing his consulting and doctoral work on the interactions of law, medicine, psychology and management (through Unisa). Multiplin was incorporated in England and Wales in the same year. He was selected on merit to receive the H Bradlow Scholarship to support his doctoral research. His doctoral work deepened and broadened his analysis of malpractice law as applied in clinical medicine and surgery. He also expanded the analysis to include applications in industrial psychology (integrating aspects of law, management and psychology). Further important aspects covered in the doctoral thesis include: the role of health psychology in medical law; the scope of clinical and preventive integrative medicine, with examples of applications; and the roles of law and psychology in the development of a more integrative mainstream medicine.

In 2007, he was appointed as Principal Lecturer at Cranefield College, where he created the international multimedia distance learning (MDL) division. He currently maintains this position, and continues to write, to teach and to consult in his interdisciplinary-specialist capacity. He has published a number of articles, and is currently completing work on a practical textbook on Malpractice Law (with Christopher Woodrow). In his writing, teaching and practice, he continually advocates the need for partnership and integration between medicine and law (and relevant areas of psychology and management).

He enjoys travelling, which has included various destinations in the UK and Ireland, Western and Eastern Europe, Zanzibar and Africa, Asia and Australia, and the USA; he values experiencing a variety of languages and cultures, and is passionate about wildlife and the natural environment. His leisure activities include snorkelling and scuba diving, skiing and hiking, and playing guitar and piano.