The Tsunami that hit Sri Lanka on December 26th 2004 caused thousands of victims among the population and highlighted the need to strengthen the country’s disaster preparedness and its management of complex emergencies.

Among the post disaster rehabilitation activities is a project funded by the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and implemented by the Italian National Health Institute (Istituto Superiore di Sanita – ISS). Its purpose is to strengthen national skills relating to planning, managing and coordinating emergencies in Sri Lanka.

The project is intended to support the Ministry of Health of Sri Lanka and the National Institute of Health Sciences (NIHS), an institutional counterpart of ISS, in planning and carrying out a training programme on emergency management.

The project’s strategic approach is new and innovative. It adopts a top-down system. 75 trainers are selected at a national level from all Sri Lanka districts and from the NIHS. These health providers are educated to become trainers of 660 middle level health managers selected at a divisional level. In turn, they pass on the skills and the didactic methodology. The didactic approach is the problem-based learning (PBL), which makes use of case studies, role-play, simulation and self-evaluation : the trainer is a facilitator rather than a teacher.

1. workshops were carried out. In the first two workshops (November and December 2005) the curriculum was developed in collaboration with the national and local managers; in the third (January 2006) the participants were trained according to the PBL approach; in the fourth (February 2006), in collaboration with experts from the Associazione Italiana di Medicina delle Catastrofi (AIMC), the reading material was selected, reviewed and identified in a single document to be used in the course as reference material for the management of disasters and complex emergencies; in the last workshop (March 2006) the contents were adapted to the national context and the course was developed according with the PBL principles.