Three clinicians from Lincoln County Hospital have been invited to share their expertise and to train medical staff to become CPR trainers in hospitals across Sri Lanka.
Consultant Cardiologist David O’Brien, Consultant Cardiologist Dinal Taleyratne and Lead Resuscitation Practitioner Monique Loveday will all be travelling to Sri Lanka later this month.
Dr Taleyratne was born in Sri Lanka and has always wanted to return and give something back to the country of his birth. He has spent the last year planning the trip.
He said: “My parents and my extended family are all from Sri Lanka and I was born there. I have always wanted to return and offer my support in some way. Because of the registration requirements for clinicians in Sri Lanka we are unable to provide medical care, but we can provide life support training.
“In the UK we have access to robust standardised resuscitation training that is not easily accessible in Sri Lanka. We are supporting doctors by instructing on a local European Resuscitation Council Advanced Life Support course in addition to training staff on a bespoke ‘train-the-trainer’ course which we have helped develop, sharing our knowledge on specific areas of specialised cardiac care.”
The trip has been funded by the trio outside of NHS budgets.
Monique said: “All three of us have a real passion around training, education and sharing knowledge and expertise. We are all trained to teach UK and European Resuscitation Council courses and we are excited to be involved in helping to organise a new educational platform in a country that does not currently have the same formal structure in place that we do.
“We take so much for granted with the NHS. We have the benefit of its history and all of the hard work and experience that has got us where we are today.”
The plan is that hospital staff from across Sri Lanka will travel to non-clinical centres for the training and will then take their new knowledge and experience to teach other colleagues back at their local hospitals.
Professor O’Brien is professor of medical education at the School of Medicine, University of Nottingham, and is also Vice-Dean at the Lincoln Medical School. He has worked as an interventional cardiologist in United Lincolnshire Hospitals NHS Trust for 16 years where he was former Clinical Director for Cardiology, opening the Lincolnshire Heart Centre at the Trust in 2013. He has been teaching Advanced Life Support (ALS) for 25 years and has been an ALS course medical director for 15 years.
He said: “As an ALS Committee Member of the Resus Council UK, I appreciate the profound benefits that both timely basic and advanced life support training provide to patients. I have been educating people within clinical environments for the majority of my professional life and teaching advanced life support courses not only in this country but more recently in China and India.
“I truly believe that education is a powerful tool and a wonderful gift and one which we often take for granted. I am really excited to have the opportunity to offer the benefit of our combined years of experience to another country that currently just does not have the same infrastructure and financial resource to support with teaching and training of these vital skills, as we are fortunate enough to have in the UK.
“I feel privileged to work on this project as part of such a fantastic team, and also with such dedicated colleagues in Sri Lanka. I think it reaffirms to me that wherever you are in the world, clinicians all have the same common goal; that of improving outcomes for their patients.”
Dr Taleyratne added: “I am most looking forward to working with the team in Sri Lanka, looking at how we can contribute a little bit of our knowledge to help them on their journey. I also think we might be able to learn from them. They are creating an exciting programme where resuscitation skills are taught in schools. For a developing country to be doing this when we are not, shows there is a lot we can learn from each other.”
Image shows Consultant Cardiologist Dinal Taleyratne, Lead Resuscitation Practitioner Monique Loveday and Consultant Cardiologist David O’Brien at the Lincolnshire Heart Centre. Picture credit: United Lincolnshire Hospitals NHS Trust
