Dr. Samadhi Rajapaksa has been appointed as the new chairman of the National Authority on Tobacco & Alcohol (NATA), falling under the purview of the Ministry of Health and Indigenous Medicine, on 20th January 2020.
Dr. Samadhi Rajapaksa is the founder of the Cancer Care Association Sri Lanka. He initiated the CCASL in 2003 in Anuradhapura, thus giving rise to this precious organization that has done a monumental service to cancer patients of Sri Lanka during the last sixteen years.
He is a past student of the Ananda College Colombo and proceeded to follow his undergraduate studies at the Vitebsk State Medical University in Belarus. He was an exceptional student with a born talent for aesthetics in terms of Sri Lankan traditional Dancing and Music. While continuing his higher studies in Belarus, he had conducted more than three hundred solo performances in traditional dancing and has choreographed many such events that he became famous throughout Belarus, Russia and Eastern Europe, which also earned him a honorary studentship in the Peoples Friendship University of Russia (University of Lumumba). He was honored with the Presidential Award for dancing in Belarus and granted the Yurie Gagarin Diploma for upliftment of inter- cultural relationship between Sri Lanka and Russia.
After graduating from the Vitebsk State Medical University with a MD (Hons), he returned to Sri Lanka where he was appointed as an intern doctor of the Anuradhapura Teaching Hospital.
In the years that followed after 2003, his academic career grew along with the growth of CCASL and by 2015 he was academically more than well equipped to serve his patients with a PhD in Buddhist Philosophy, MA in Buddhist Ayurvedic Counseling and many Palliative Care trainings in India, Singapore and China. Along with that, CCASL had become a well-established non-governmental organization with 3 branches (Colombo – Head Office, Galle & Anuradhapura) and more than 5000 members, Island-wide.
Being a devoted Buddhist and an exceptional practitioner of meditation who has reached a level beyond imagination where only a being with a mind superior to him could decipher, he uses such skills that he has developed for the spiritual development of both his patients and his fellows. This has enabled him to provide a consummate service for the patients who are subjected to his consultation, at the Patients Liaison and Counseling Center of the National Cancer Institute, Maharagama where he is currently the Medical Officer in Charge.
Throughout the years, Dr. Samadhi Rajapaksa has played a vital and a pivotal role in the success of the CCASL and has ensured that its services are utilized by the needy patients who come under his preview, in a very efficient and judicious manner. The Cancer Care Hospice network and The Home Base Palliative Care Service (the first ever such service in Sri Lanka) are two of the best inspirational initiatives that has materialized through the CCASL, under his leadership. This has earned the organization with much deserved recognition from international bodies such as The Asia Pacific Hospice & Palliative Care Network and even from the World Health Organization (WHO). For his ground breaking work on Palliative Care in the Sri Lankan health care sector, he has been recognized as a National Patron of the Regional Association for Palliative Care – Northern Province.
Dr. Samadhi W. Rjapaksa is a man with astonishing talents and capabilities. He’s distinguished as a person with a remedial and a considerate touch with a compassionate heart for the not-so-affluent. His dream and undertaking is not an easy one although he continues his exertion with utmost fidelity and commitment. His association with his patients and the service rendered so far is beyond words, which incorporate him with a character that will naturally pass on to a position with greater power that is seldom attainable by any other commonplace human being.
