Reflections from the 2017 BSIR

Created - 30.11.2017

The 2017 BSIR was the 30th Annual Scientific Meeting (ASM), hosted by the world-renowned International Conference Centre (ICC) in the vibrant and modern City of Birmingham. Birmingham people are often referred to as “Brummies” and there are approximately 1.4 million Brummies’ in the metropolitan Birmingham area with an annual GDP of £140 billion. 

The much-loved Brummie accent hails from the Black Country; an area to the west of Birmingham where the coal seam runs close to the surface and which housed numerous Ironworks, foundries and forges during the industrial revolution. Birmingham’s success began during the industrial revolution in the 18th century, with world-renowned advances in science and technology and a distinctive economic success based on thousands of small workshops practising a wide variety of specialised skills, encouraged by exceptional levels of creativity and innovation. 

I can’t help thinking of the similarities with the history of IR. What is even more interesting is that Birmingham has had to adapt to succeed and is now developed a modern international commercial service sector, music and culture. It would seem that BSIR could learn a lot from this, suggesting we also need to evolve as the environment around us changes. This in some ways is needed for our survival but also to maintain our leading role in image guided surgical techniques which benefit patients. We need to embrace all necessary changes to protect and further develop IR into a modern and successful clinical service for our patients. 

Now you may all have thought that the ASM being in Birmingham would make life easy for me but in fact not, as it was not financially sensible to stay in town. I had accepted that the travel; train in and Uber home, would add 60 mins to my day, but I had not calculated for the fact that Uber taxi’s do not drive above 30mph after midnight – even when there was no one else on the road! They were very long journeys home at night, although I enjoyed seeing the local countryside, even with a couple of “coffees” on board. The morning train journeys were made all the better travelling just in a shirt as I left my suit with Ruth Moss and her colleagues.

The ASM has been evolving over the last 4-5yrs, driven in large part by the Scientific Programme Committee and membership suggestions. There is an increasing breadth of content, aiming to encompass the wide spectrum of Interventional Radiology or as we should now say “Image Guided Surgeons”. I was extremely pleased to see further developments in the Paediatric IR section where leading PIR’s were a great advertisement for the subject. The interest is growing as demonstrated by Alex Barnacle (Paediatric Interventional Radiologist, Great Ormond Street Hospital) being awarded the Graham Plant travelling professorship. We also had a great section on women in IR – what an inspiring group! This year saw a number of new topic additions and developments with topics such as “work life balance”, “on call” and “coding”. On the face of it these are all a  bit scary and new to many of us – I hear you say just let me get on with the intervention there is so much to do. But we need to take stock and ensure we develop holistically; we cannot expect to be treated as clinicians if we keep acting like technicians. We need therefore to engage with coding of IR, the financial business side of IR, the registries and M&M meetings. We are some of the hardest working consultant groups within the hospitals, who constantly have the pressure of reporting held over us like the Sword of Damocles – I hear colleagues say, “I did not fill the registry data in as my time was better spent reporting two CT scans which would save my Trust money”. I get it – but it is, in my view, the wrong tactic – the reporting is a Trust problem and we won’t solve it. We need to ensure that we as clinicians provide all the information required to prove our procedures and outcomes are good. We also need this data to improve our techniques and the data will be used (by someone if not by us) for commissioning purposes. So, reporting a few CT’s rather than putting your data into a registry is a bit like Turkey’s voting for Christmas! 

The meeting was a great success and one of the best bits of the meeting is the social calendar, where you can talk to anyone about anything. It is always brilliant to be able to catch up with friends and make new ones. Thanks to Hulla and his team. It is clear that the meeting will need to evolve over the coming few years and we need to ensure that we are reactive to the needs of the membership to develop and protect our future ASM’s which are so important for us as a group.

I’d like to finish with a few facts you may not know about Birmingham:

 - The city centre has more canals than Venice (35 vs 25 miles).

 - There are 571 parks within Birmingham metropolitan area.

 - The city is home to many famous names: Duncan Campbell (UB40), Ozzy Osbourne (Black Sabbath), Nick Mason (Pink Floyd), Judas Priest, ELO, Digby Jones, Nigel Mansell, Enoch Powell and George Cadbury of the Cadbury’s chocolate dynasty.

However, the most famous person of all, at this time of the year, is someone you will have heard a lot of on the radio recently – lead singer of Slade, Noddy Holder MBE.

So, with that I wish everyone a Happy New Year!

Ian McCafferty Vice President, Birmingham