National Authority on Tobacco and Alcohol (NATA) along with Ministry of Health has planned a program series to “train and orient resource people on tobacco and alcohol control district vise”. This includes training primary care doctors, PHIs and health education officers.
As the initial step to this we conducted the first training program successfully, as a three-day residential workshop for primary care doctors (MO-NCD, MO-MH and MOH doctors) covering Western and Southern provinces. It was from 1st to 3rd of March, 2017 at the auditorium of National Institute of Mental Health, Angoda.
A group including 30 doctors participated actively in the workshop and a review meeting to assess about the actions taken for the public in their particular MOH area will be assessed in 6 months. From the workshop, few doctors were randomly selected to gather for a meeting at the NATA premises on 3rd of April 2017 to discuss about what can be improved in these training programs in future. Necessary decisions were taken after discussing with Prof. Diyanath Samarasingha, Dr. Jayamal De Silva (consultant psychiatrist), Dr. Sajeewa Ranaweera who were few in the resource team at this workshop and Dr. Palitha Abeykoon (Chairman,NATA).With consideration of these decisions we hope to develop this program and planning to conduct the next program in June,2017.
