Dr. Jerrard Fernando
The President
Sri Lanka College of Radiologists

I am honored to be elected as the 17th President of the Sri Lanka College of Radiologists for the year 2021.

It is a challenging time for field of Radiology in Sri Lanka. Due to the vast strides in the technical and computer fields, Imaging has become the fastest growing field in medicine. Imaging methods improve and surpass the previous methods every year. Across all medical fields, diagnostic imaging has become the cornerstone of patient management.

As the dependency on imaging grows , more and more clinicians are learning to interpret imaging, this is more so in the fields of subspecialties. If we are to cater to the growing need of imaging, we need to provide the services on time, need to be available for the clinicians, and we have to be on par with knowledge of even the sub specialty clinicians.

Hence a definite need of the time for Sri Lankan radiology is the sub specialties. We already have Neuro radiology, Interventional and Pediatric Radiology as recognized subspecialties in Sri Lanka. We need to expand this further to include Cardiothoracic, Musculoskeletal, Women’s Imaging, Oncology and Emergency Imaging if we are to stop transgression of others in to our field, and we need to do this urgently. College of Radiologist plan to advocate this essential matter during the coming year.

Our field is equipment based. Some our Radiologists in the peripheries still have to borrow the USS of other clinicians. Together with my council I hope to convince the Ministry of Health to provide the every Radiologists with at least a good high end Ultra Sound Scanner.

Continuous medical education is an essential part of SLCR activity.

I hope to conduct at least one clinical meeting , virtual or physical, every other month. Our own young radiologists need to be given the opportunity to sharpen their skills at presentations and I hope that they will come forward to share their knowledge with the radiology community of Sri Lanka. The knowledge thus gained should translate to excellent patient care by practicing radiologists.

Through all these we need to project the Radiologists as patient’s imaging physician.

We need to encourage the publishing of research and articles in our own Radiology Journal. I would like to thank the Editors, present and past for their untiring efforts to continue the Journal in these trying times. We are members of a specialty with amazing and unparalleled opportunities for clinical care, education, and scientific advancement.

I encourage all Radiologists, and Trainees specially the young radiologists, to join SLCR to advance our specialty through out our mother land for the the benefit of our patients.

Thank you
The President- Sri Lanka College of Radiologists
Dr. Jerrard Fernando
Email – jerrardf@gmail.com