Dr. Ravindra Pathirathna joined the School of Health and Social Care and CaHRU in March 2017 as its first visiting international research fellow. Ravindra graduated in medicine from the University of Peradeniya and then completed postgraduate studies at the University of Colombo, Sri Lanka, in the field of medical administration where he gained his master’s and MD.

He has worked for 14 years as a medical officer in emergency medicine, health system manager and health care researcher. As a health system manager he developed experience in various fields of hospital and public health programme management. He worked as a hospital director in many secondary and tertiary care hospitals in Sri Lanka and worked as deputy provincial director of the health department in the central province of Sri Lanka. His main interests are in operational management, system development and quality improvement in health care.

Ravindra has published several research papers, for example in the Journal of Medical Administration in Sri Lanka, mainly in the area of health systems. These include: a study testing a new model of evaluation of health policy; interventional research using total quality principles and systems theory in inter-hospital patient transports; and workload assessment in health care administrative staff. He has also published in the fields of: cost evaluation of healthcare training; managerial approaches to waiting time reduction in clinical settings; interventions to improve clinical facility management; an epidemiological study on dengue in different climatic conditions and an evaluation of care in older people. He is a member of several academic associations in Sri Lanka including the College of Medical Administration of Sri Lanka.

During his visiting fellowship he will be studying the prehospital emergency system in the UK, mainly focusing on policy and operational background, ambulance service quality and clinical performance improvement. His main objective is to identify and develop an appropriate prehospital care model for a developing country such as Sri Lanka.

By Dr Ravindra Pathirathna