P. S. Rachitha Buddhika - American's Award for Best Educational Institute in Healthcare

Mr. Rachitha Buddhika, the chairman of Surado Campus of Business Management, has blazed a trail as the visionary who has catapulted the public’s conception of the caregiver clean away from the old, dark days of Florence Nightingale and has sent it squarely into the 21^st century.  Allow us to give some background about our institute. Surado Campus of Business Management was established in 2012. In just ten years, we have gone from strength to strength and we now stand as the number one provider of professional caregiving courses in Sri Lanka and all across South East Asia.

We have been officially recognized on many occasions for our hard work and achievements and we have won a plethora of prestigious awards, including the Sramabhimani award 2019, the Emerging Education Institute in Healthcare award, the Excellence in Educational Leadership Award and the Exceptional Woman of Excellence Award (given to our Director, Ms. Disani Adihetti) at the South Asian Business Excellence Awards 2021. Surado prides itself on its social responsibility programmes. We recognize the need to “give back” to the community, and to the nation as a whole. We have instigated many trailblazing projects such as the Surado Green project in Kurunegala, a special eco-friendly exercise. We regularly hold special events, such as at the SOS Children’s Village centre in Piliyandala, attended by all of our staff, the Medi Camps initiative whereby we visit orphanages and homes and provide free health check-ups to residents and staff.

Furthermore, we regularly hold alms-giving events, whereby we give essential items such as dry foods and milk powder, as well as other daily essentials such as toiletries to those in need, to mark special landmark occasions, for example the 10^th anniversary of the company.

 Surado Campus are pioneers of the radical concept of caregivers as “Family Doctors”, and as the population of many countries is ageing, the proportion of elderly people who require and will require caregivers will only continue to increase, which means there are incredible numbers of career opportunities worldwide – especially in countries such as the UK, Canada, Japan as well as an increasingly large number of European nations.

Caregiving has shot to the top of the list of the most in-demand professions around the globe right now. Also, since COVID 19 began to wreak havoc in 2020, the need for professional caregivers has actually doubled as elderly populations became decimated by the virus. We were one of the few organisations in Sri Lanka that actually managed to expand and prosper during that bleak period.

Caregiving is the only profession where people are 100% employable. Here in Sri Lanka, our more traditional main job markets, namely tourism and agriculture, are no longer considered the jobs for life they once were due to a combination of unfortunate factors.  Surado’s approach to training is not a traditional one. We use state of the art equipment allied with cutting edge skills and techniques to train our students to be able to practice their chosen profession anywhere.

I firmly believe that it is our emphasis on the “human touch” that gives us the edge over our competitors. Not only that, but as large numbers of our students migrate to foreign countries, so we have our language Academy, providing English courses like IELTS, TOEIC, TOEFL and OET. Japanese language classes are also conducted, plus we also arrange working visas for a wide range of countries.

Not only this, but we take our responsibilities to our students very seriously. We hold regular career guidance programs, where we give full help and support on all aspects of their future, from help with CV writing and job interview skills, to helping them to obtain their visas. Why do we do this? We strongly believe that it is our duty to provide these services in order to make their transition into their new lives as caregivers as simple and problem-free as we can. Also, we can see it gives them that added motivation in their chosen profession.

We are recognized by many important bodies both in Sri Lanka and worldwide, including the Tertiary & Vocational Education Commission (TVEC), the Health Regulatory Council, Australian Qualifications Framework, and also many internationally renowned education centers like Lincoln University College in Malaysia, Cambridge Career College and University College Birmingham in the UK.

I wish to thank the American Awards panel for identifying our strengths and for recognizing our organisation as the number one vocational training institute in South East Asia.