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In the late 1990’s, key stakeholders in the management of Sri Lanka’s health system worked to address key gaps in that nation’s occupational health and public health capacity. Funded and supported by the Sri Lanka Ministry of Health, and the Postgraduate Institute of Medicine at the University of Colombo, postgraduate doctors completed training in recognised institutions overseas.
Three Sri Lankan doctors spent a 12-month period learning from our team of experts within the Monash Centre for Occupational and Environmental Health (MonCOEH). Here they undertook postgraduate training in core public health research subjects, and engaged in a program of research seminars and site visits to workplaces and stakeholder organisations, such as the Department of Health, Worksafe Victoria, occupational medicine practices and community health services.
Dr Inoka Suraweera, Dr Suranga Fernando and Dr Dilara Supun Wijesinghe are three of the doctors who took part in the program, and they’ve recently contacted us with an update on what they’re now doing.
Dr Inoka Suraweera is now a Consultant Community Physician and Technical Head of the Environmental and Occupational Health Unit at the Ministry of Health in Sri Lanka. With developing interests in occupational mental health, musculoskeletal disease, chemical exposures, climate change and air pollution she’s got a burgeoning research career, with a growing track record in journal publication and conference presentations. She’s taken on a role at the International Commission on Occupational Health, and is a member of the prestigious Collegium Ramazzini in Italy.
Separate to her research and advisory work, she’s also now actively passing on her knowledge to the next generation of Sri Lankan health and medical students. Dr Suraweera teaches occupational and environmental health at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels at three Sri Lankan Universities, coordinating a module on gender and occupational health at the University of Colombo and a module on occupational health for the MSc in Community Medicine at the Postgraduate Institute of Medicine, University of Colombo, Sri Lanka.
Reflecting on her time in Australia, Dr Suraweera says, “The year I spent at Monash was really pivotal in my career. It ignited my interest in this field, and I’m really proud that I’ve been able to contribute to medical knowledge, work on occupational health, and pass some of the learnings from Melbourne to the next generation of doctors here in Sri Lanka. It’s reassuring to know I can help ensure the safety and wellbeing of our future workforces.”
Dr Suranga Fernando went on to work as a public health specialist in the Central Province in Sri Lanka. In this role he’s been responsible for managing large parts of the region’s COVID-19 pandemic response and immunisation programs, both of which have been lauded for their success.
In 2022, Dr Fernando joined the World Health Organization as an immunization consultant, and is currently on assignment in Timor-Leste. Here he supports the local district’s health service with planning, coordination, training, logistics management, monitoring and evaluation of the COVID-19 vaccine deployment, and strengthening the local non-COVID immunization programmes and disease surveillance strategies.
“As with many other parts of the world, Sri Lanka has had to learn fast and adapt to the evolving challenges thrown at us by the emergence of a new virus,” he says. “It’s been an incredibly busy and challenging time for me, and I’m so grateful for the sound knowledge base, core skills and confidence I picked up in my time with MonCOEH. It’s really supported me as I’ve taken on these vital roles, and I’m extremely proud to be supporting our own regional neighbours in turn.”
Dr Supun Dilara Wijesinghe was one of our earliest graduates, leaving Monash in 2014 and going to work for National Institute of Health Sciences (WHO Collaboration Centre for Workforce Development Sri Lanka). Since then he’s taken on roles tackling leprosy (Technical Head, Anti-Leprosy Campaign Sri Lanka), establishing a national online disease surveillance platform, and implementing an anti-microbial response surveillance system. He’s also been involved in training health professionals from regional neighbours, including Bhutan, and in undergraduate and postgraduate public health teaching and research supervision.
In 2019 Dr Wijesinghe assumed a leadership role at the country’s Family Health, Nutrition and Behaviour Research unit at the Health Promotion Bureau, and helped oversee a Centre of Excellence in risk communication, community mobilisation and surveillance during the COVID-19 pandemic. During his time there he’s built numerous collaborations with Oxford University, Imperial College London, and Griffith University here in Australia. The Health Promotion Bureau sits at the forefront of public health field staff capacity-building, and one of their flagship programs is training staff for a national Mother’s Support Group initiative. More recently, they have started an island-wide UNICEF-supported programme tackling nutrition issues caused by escalating inflation. The unit headed by Dr Wijesinghe also collaborates closely with the World Health Organization, World Food Programme, Child Fund, Save the Children, Sarvodaya and Scaling Up Nutrition Peoples Forum Sri Lanka.
An avid traveller and foodie, he’s drawn upon these interests for his work – in 2020 he helped organise the ‘Supreme Chef’ programme in Sri Lanka, promoting home cooking of nutritious recipes, and judged by a MasterChef Australia finalist.
He says, “The skills I gained in Melbourne those years ago have helped me have a really rich, varied and rewarding career. I’ve applied them to so many different challenges, and am really pleased to see Sri Lanka’s health workforce becoming more sustainable. It gives me great hope for the future.”
Dr Helen Kelsall and Professor Malcolm Sim AM supervised the doctors during their time at MonCOEH. Dr Kelsall says, “This was an exciting contribution to improving global health and building local capacity in occupational health at the time, and the students made welcome contributions to the life of our School that we remember fondly. To be contacted out of the blue by some of them, sharing their thanks and telling us how they’ve used their knowledge is both surprising and genuinely touching. I’m very proud of all of them, and grateful for the opportunity to have been part of their journeys.”
Dr Jayamini Illesinghe is now the School Manager for SPHPM. She says, “Being of Sri Lankan heritage myself, this was a particularly rewarding program for me to oversee. Sri Lanka is a beautiful country, with huge resource and great human capacity. This training program helped them create a framework to harness some of that capacity for health workforce expansion and research development. It’s lovely to see the impact our graduates have had, and see them in turn pass their knowledge onto a new generation of students, and other neighbouring nations.”
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