City, hospital, date, time, case type, specialist needed, notes. Under a minute.
Copy the case link, share on WhatsApp, or let verified specialists browse open cases.
They see the case, leave an optional note, and mark themselves available. You get notified by email.
Review applicants, tap Accept, and coordinate directly on WhatsApp. Case closed.
ORIF Radius at Tokai Melomed, starting 4:00 PM. Needs an FCA-qualified anaesthetist. Twenty seconds of typing.
Twelve verified anaesthetists in his city see the case appear on their dashboard, live.
Taps the link in theatre prep, leaves a note ("free after my 3pm list"), marks available.
Also free, sends a note. Dr Atwaru now sees two verified responders on his dashboard.
Picks Dr Peterson. System sends a confirmation with contact details. Case closed.
Time from posting to specialist confirmed: 10 minutes. On WhatsApp, this usually takes 20 to 40 minutes of phone calls, missed messages, and chasing availability. Every surgeon we've talked to has a version of this story.
Has a walk-in fracture at 3pm and no anaesthetist. Posts the case on SurgiLink while changing scrubs. Has two responders by the time he's gloved.
Lives in WhatsApp groups but misses half the cases. Sets up SurgiLink once. Gets notified for every matching case in their city for the rest of the month.
Needs a perfusionist and an echocardiographer for a last-minute add-on. Posts two separate cases. Both confirmed before the patient is in theatre.
SurgiLink stays out of the money between surgeon and specialist. Coordinate payment directly, like you do today.
Posting cases is and will always be free.
Once we scale past the pilot, a small monthly membership. Cancel any time. You'll be told before anything changes.
Every specialist profile is manually checked against the public HPCSA register before they can respond to a case. No anonymous bidders.
Hosted in a POPIA-appropriate region. Case details purged after 12 months, bid notes after 6 months.
Cases are only visible to verified specialists matching the required specialty and city. Not a public board.
Export everything we have on you as JSON, or delete your account, with one click from your settings.
Yes, during the pilot. Free to post cases, free to respond, no subscription, no per-case charges. After the pilot, specialists may pay a small monthly membership fee. Surgeons will always post for free. SurgiLink never takes a cut of payments between surgeon and specialist.
Specialists submit their HPCSA number during signup. An admin manually checks it against the public HPCSA register (hpcsa.co.za) before approving. Typical turnaround is a few hours during business hours. Surgeons go through the same admin approval for name + hospital affiliation. Nothing is auto-approved.
No. We never collect patient data. Case notes are meant for logistics (NPO status, FCA required, time flexibility, etc.) — we prompt surgeons not to include patient identifiers. We handle doctor contact details and case metadata (hospital, date, case type), nothing more.
Every major SA metro: Cape Town, Johannesburg, Pretoria, Durban, Port Elizabeth, East London, Bloemfontein, Polokwane, and Nelspruit. Matching is city-level, so specialists only see cases in their own city. If your city isn't listed, pick "Other" during signup and email us so we know there's demand.
Surgeons can withdraw any open case before accepting a bid; every applicant gets a polite notification. Once you accept a specialist, coordinate directly on WhatsApp — SurgiLink is a matchmaker, not a dispatcher. If something urgent changes after accept, message the accepted specialist directly.
On the pilot today, specialists get an email the moment you post (and you share the link into a WhatsApp group for redundancy). A surgeon on the pilot has matched a case in 10 minutes end-to-end. Speed scales with your signed-up specialist density in each city.
Not yet. During the pilot SurgiLink is operated by two individuals — a software engineer and a Cape Town anaesthetist — as a side project to test whether the idea works. Your data is handled per POPIA principles regardless. If usage proves it out, we register a (Pty) Ltd and formalise things with a proper team.
Locum agencies (LocumBase, A24) are for shift-based staffing at hospitals — you sign up, they book you days or weeks. SurgiLink is for the specific-case marketplace: a surgeon has ORIF at 2pm today and needs an FCA anaesthetist now. WhatsApp groups solve that urgency but are noisy and unmoderated. SurgiLink is the structured layer on top: matched by specialty+city, HPCSA-verified, with a dashboard instead of scrollback.
SurgiLink started because Christiaan, a South African anaesthetist, kept missing cases. Not because he was unavailable. Because the case came through a WhatsApp group at the wrong time, got buried under other messages, and by the time he saw it the surgeon had already phoned a list of friends.
At the same time, surgeons he worked with were spending twenty minutes on each unplanned case just trying to find someone to help. Phone trees. Texts that went unanswered. The same four or five people getting the same cases, while dozens of qualified specialists nearby had no idea the opportunity existed.
SurgiLink is the structured layer on top of that mess. Post a case, match on what matters (specialty, city, availability), let everyone decide for themselves. Nothing fancy. Just the thing that should have existed already.
Free during the pilot. No subscription. No commitment. Your account takes a minute to set up.
Questions? hello@surgilink.co.za