Interventional radiology ‘a clinical specialty’

Created - 12.09.2013

Regardless of whether you work within a DGH or are a consultant based in a tertiary centre and regardless of which specific area of IR is you practice in , there is now a rapid transition from a technique based specialty to a more clinically based practice. 

Dare I say we already have a degree of subspecialisation within our new subspecialty of IR. But what links us all together apart from our imaging roots, and sets us apart from technicians carrying out other important procedures in our trusts, is that we are integrally responsible for the care our patients recieve from the time they are referred to us to the time we hand them back to the our clinical colleagues or directly to the GP.

In many instances this may be joint care or we may be solely responsible for that hospital episode. This requires a breadth of knowledge, the ability to communicate the available treatment options to our patients and the skills to liaise with fellow allied professionals. This means we need to be well educated in the management of the patients disease, have time for seeing patients in a formal clinic environment, consent our patients away from the IR room and see them afterwards on the ward and or clinic so we know what is happening to them post intervention. 

It is really nice to get feedback and sometimes thanks from our patients for our efforts, but far more importantly we can ensure that patients are managed correctly and not ignored because they have had a ‘minor radiological procedure’, often quoted by nurses and some clinical colleagues. 

This requires difficult discussion within our trusts locally to ensure we have the requisite time and nationally to ensure we receive the right training and education. We need to ensure adequate numbers of future interventional radiologists are trained. 

We are all incredibly busy as radiologists both with reporting mountains or CT and MR not to mention plain films in addition to the IR workload which is continuously growing. We need imaging as a core part of how we deliver IR (and certain elements such as acute trauma may be best reviewed by IR’s) but perhaps we are no longer best placed to deliver it all. Most importantly we need to ensure that there sufficient numbers of us to deliver these services to the highest standards not least in our DGH’s.

Raman Uberoi, BSIR Secretary