Join international IR leaders for a conversation about global IR at the SIR Global IR Summit: IR Global Educational Discrepancies Impacting IR Workforce and Awareness on Saturday, March 29, from 3–5 p.m. CT.
“The Global IR Summit is a session where all the IR leaders of the world come together to present and learn about the state of IR across the globe. This helps in understanding the state of affairs and working together in finding solutions to those issues,” said Shams I. Iqbal, MD, FSIR, one of the session coordinators.
Last year’s summit was part of the motivation for the update to the Global Statement Defining Interventional Radiology, a multi-society consensus statement co-published by the Journal of Interventional Radiology and CardioVascular and Interventional Radiology.
This year, the summit will place a significant emphasis on global IR education. According to Dr. Iqbal, last year's summit served as "the first step in understanding the situation," which was followed by a comprehensive questionnaire that garnered around 1,600 responses from IR practitioners worldwide.
This questionnaire helped lay the groundwork for further action items and identified key challenges—one of which was IR education.
“The IR world is a vast network of practitioners, and with ever-increasing interactions it is utmost important that SIR supports the growth and development of IR across the globe to improve IR access to the large population across the globe,” Dr. Iqbal said. “This is the correct thing to do. We are glad a lot of SIR and CIRSE leaders are deeply vested in this endeavor.”
Leaders will provide brief presentations, followed by Q&A sessions focused on the status of IR education, recruitment challenges and global IR aspirations.
Dr. Iqbal emphasized that the session will be interesting and informational to anyone who is interested in or involved in global IR.
“Almost everyone is interested and has the desire to grow the world of IR,” Dr. Iqbal said. “So, in essence, the target audience is everyone.”
The Global IR discussions continue on Sunday, March 30 at 4:45 p.m. during the SIR Connect Townhall, IR Education and Practice around the world: Potential efforts for global improvement of IR Practice through education.
