Vashti Fairhead

Vashti Fairhead has been employed at Tabankulu Primary as Program Manager since 2007. She is a qualified social worker who graduated from the University of Cape Town in 1995, and has been working in the field of addiction for the past five years. Her experience includes work in numerous primary, secondary and outpatient care facilities in Cape Town. She has previously been employed at Kenilworth Clinic and Harmony House. Vashti leads the primary team at Tabankulu and is responsible for program development and co-ordination as well as managing the overall program. She has been instrumental in developing the eating disorder program at Tabankulu and works closely with Tabankulu Secondary Care in order to facilitate a recursive flow of expertise and wellness between the two institutions. Vashti has a high work ethic and brings energy and enthusiasm to the Primary Care team.

Guy Du Plessis

Clinical Head of Programme - B.A. (Psych),  Dip. Counselling (Unisa)

Guy has worked in the field of addiction for over  ten years and has experienced working in and setting up Tabankulu’s Primary, Secondary and Tertiary Care centres. He has completed a BA counselling psychology with distinction and is currently doing postgraduate studies in psychology, furthermore he holds a counselling diploma from the University of South Africa. As the Clincal Head of Programme, Guy has developed and implemented the Integrated Recovery Model, which has yielded extraordinary results as a treatment modality. Guy is internationally recognised as one of the leading pioneers in the field of integrally informed addiction and recovery approaches, and is the first clinician to design and implement an integrally informed addiction treatment model in an in-patient addition treatment setting.

Frances Ward

Frances has been working in the Addiction/ Counselling field for the last six years. She completed her BA Honours in Psychology at Rhodes University in 2000. After a couple of years of teaching English to foreigners, she went overseas to London for 6 years where she furthered her studies through the Priory Hospitals qualifying as an Addictions Therapist in 2006. She worked as a School Mentor in a London High School for 2 years, counselling pupils with serious behavioural problems and special needs. After this she worked at HMP Brixton/Southwark DIP assessing and counselling drug offenders. This work lead on to her working as an Addiction counsellor at the RAPt Island Day Project in London for drug offenders who had been released and were attending an outpatient 12 step day programme.  Subsequent to this she returned to SA and joined the Tabankulu Primary team. She currently works as the Senior Counsellor.

Contact the Primary Team