CALS first came to Asia in 2012 when Adrian Levine and a team from UHSM (Manchester) went to teach at the ATCSA 2012 - 22nd Annual Congress Of The Association Of Thoracic And Cardiovascular Surgeons Of Asia in Kota Kinabalu (Borneo).
With CSU-ALS / CALS spreading across the Americas, Europe, and Australasia, it became obvious that the most populous continent on the globe needed it to!! Thus, forward-looking and innovative clinicians across Malaysia, Indi,a and China discussed the feasibility of bringing CSU-ALS / CALS to their health care systems.
In early 2018, an International CALS team from the UK, Australia, and New Zealand went to teach at Singapore General Hospital. This was well received, and subsequently, CALS lectures were performed at medical meetings in Malaysia in October 2018. The first CALS courses were held in Kuala Lumpur in September 2019 at the University of Malaya. The CALS training team was truly international, being made up of Indian, Malaysian,n and UK trainers. CALS SEA was set up and is now coordinating CALS Training across South East Asia.
Further Asia CALS expansion came to fruition in December 2018 when a CALS team taught 70 clinicians and nurses in Beijing. 2 further successful courses were run in May and October 2019 in Shanghai (Shanghai East Hospital) and Beijing (University Medical Centre). Further courses and the rollout of the Centre of Excellence (COE) model are planned for 2020.
In India, a CALS update lecture was presented at the Indian Association of Cardiothoracic Surgeons (IACTS) meeting in March 2019. Subsequently, International CALS teams went and taught in Bengaluru, Chennai, and Mangalore in 2019. Further courses are planned in 2020.