Emergency Life Care (ELC) Sri Lanka was the brain child of the Professors Chula Goonasekera (Sri Lanka) and Shane Curran (Australia) whom together had several trial runs of the program over the years in Sri Lanka before officially conducting the event. The first program was held in the southern city of Galle where the skills lab of the Emergency and Trauma unit of the Teaching Hospital Karapitiya was used for the event in 2011.

The fully fledged Australian team of instructors arrived in August 2012 for two courses in the hill capital Kandy. Each Course had 24 participants and the program had a course dinner where instructors and participants exchanged views, suggestions and feedback which was very important for the course to improve. The program ended with a symposium in Colombo before the team left to Australia.

The ELC Sri Lanka is getting popular very fast with more recognition and demand for more courses. The skills training had a tremendous impact on patient care where the Emergency Unit doctors who were trained in ELC programs were working. It is heartening to see some doctors trained in ELC Sri Lanka had implemented the “BLUE Print”, the basic management plan of emergencies, by training their colleagues and support staff of what they have acquired so the unit runs as one team.

Considered as one of the highlights in the SSCCEM calendar every year, the ELC Sri Lanka program has seen the largest number of requests to participate in a workshop by SSCCEM. ELC Sri Lanka hosted a new group of Emergency Physicians from USA in 2014. SSCCEM takes this opportunity to thank Prof Shane Curran and his energetic team of Australian Instructors for the continuous unconditional and kind contribution to the Emergency Medicine training in Sri Lanka.