Course Appraisal
Ganga CTLS Course Report
 From left to right: Ayman Farouk, Zeyad Zakareya, Mahmoud Badran, Hazem Farouk, Ahmed Elmalt, Tamer Ads & Hossam Abubeih SICOT Associate Members – Egypt |
Firstly, we would all like to thank SICOT and Prof Rajasekaran, SICOT President Elect and the Head of the Orthopaedic Department at Ganga hospital, for giving us this opportunity to attend one of the most valuable courses in dealing with trauma patients: the Comprehensive Trauma Life Support (CTLS) course.
We would also like to thank those who chose our team from Egypt, especially Prof Hatem Galal Said and Prof Osama Farouk. It was really a great experience because for us the course started one month before the actual date of the course, which was held from 25 to 27 March 2016. The faculty of the course had sent us the course manual one month earlier to study well, in preparation for the instructor course which we attended and successfully passed after completion of the CTLS course.
The CTLS course was held in Coimbatore, the capital of Tamil Nadu in the south of India, which is a really lovely place with helpful and kind people. Ganga Hospital was the venue for the course which is a big fully-equipped hospital and one of the most famous hospitals in India.
We reached Coimbatore on 24 March 2016 by plane. We were then taken to a pleasant hotel and spent that night preparing for our presentations the next day. On 25 March, we went to Ganga Hospital where we met the CTLS faculty and mentors and attended an interesting lecture by Prof Debashish Roy about teaching and the difficult learners. This really helped us in doing our tasks. The faculty then let us have some time with our mentors to discuss how to present lectures and to learn the skills of delivering powerful presentations. Afterwards, each one of us presented a lecture in front of the faculty. As with any respectful course, we received feedback from them separately in order to know what went well during our presentations and how to give a better one next time.
At the end of the day we had a group dinner together with the faculty and our fellow Indian instructors. After that, we had two days of lectures and workshops. The lectures were carried out in an interactive way with a lot of discussion between faculty and participants. The workshops were fabulous and interactive. We learned and practised many skills. The workshops could be made as an example of doing workshops with a limitation of resources.
We learned many things from this course and from the whole visit to India. Some of the knowledge was related to medicine and the rest related to humanity. One of the highlights of the trip was meeting Prof Tanmoy Das who is not only a good doctor but also a powerful teacher and mentor. He is also a photographer for the National Geographic Channel and has a lot of experience with wild animals and birds. We think that having a hobby in addition to being a medical care provider is of utmost importance to decrease the stress related to medical work.
We would like also to express our profound gratitude to Prof Ganapathy, Chairperson of the CTLS course, for his support and perfect organisation. Absolutely no words can express our deepest gratitude to Prof Balavenkat for his kindness and support throughout the whole course and even before travelling to India.
Finally, we recommend that everyone participate in this course either as a participant or as an instructor. We hope we will be able to organise the same course in Egypt with the same standards and to begin a long-term exchange of knowledge and experience between India and Egypt, of course under the supervision of SICOT.
