In 1995 Douglas Wilkinson was asked to write a review of trauma management for developing countries a World Health Organisation (WHO) paper. The following year he had the fortune to meet Haydn Perndt, who was then the Educational Chairman of the World Federation of Societies of Anaesthesiologists (WFSA). Haydn asked Douglas if he would run a pilot course with Marcus Skinner in Fiji in the South Pacific. Marcus Skinner, the co-author of the PTC manual, and Douglas ran the first PTC course in Suva, Fiji in 1997.
After the first few courses in Africa and the South Pacific, it soon became apparent that if the Primary Trauma Care programme was to expand, the course, instructor programmes and educational materials needed to be standardised under an organisation which addressed the specific trauma needs of developing countries.
The organisation grew slowly and expanded as the number of courses and countries expanded. Instructor courses in Oxford were started and standardised and then started abroad in order to cater for the increase in the number of instructors. This also led to the development of the Primary Trauma Care Instructor Manual and the improvement of educational materials such as the slides-set.
The World Federation of Societies of Anaesthesiologists (WFSA) were pivotal in the early development of the Primary Trauma Care Foundation and the close collaboration and generosity of the educational chairman of the WFSA enabled Primary Trauma Care to expand and take instructors to remote areas of the world in order to conduct courses.
The Primary Trauma Care manual became a WHO publication in 2003 and this with the excellent educational instructor manual enabled PTC courses to expand throughout many continents.
In 2006 the PTC Foundation became a Registered UK Charity and established a Board of Trustees; this greatly added to the stability and sustainability of the organisation.
By 2010 the PTC Manual had been translated into several languages and was freely available on the website and, to date, some 70 countries have benefited from its trauma training programmes.
