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What can attendees expect at the upcoming ECR meeting in Vienna?

by Gus Iversen, Editor in Chief | February 09, 2023
European News

HCB News: What are some of the issues being faced in European radiology?
AB: There’s the workforce issue. We’re currently running a project called EU-REST that’s looking at all the education and training necessary in all of the specialties and professions using ionizing radiation. We want to better understand workload, and the impact of workforce availability. The underpinning of how work is done differs hugely across Europe, so we’re trying to gather data to find out exactly how things are done in all EU 27 member states. In the end, we will hopefully be writing recommendations for the European Commission on improving the state of play in those countries where the staffing numbers are too low, and perhaps work on implementing some standards. So, that’s a project that excites me. We’re still in the early phase of data gathering, but I think it will be very helpful to countries that are less well staffed than others.

Appropriate use of imaging is another major issue. The EU-JUST-CT project, winding up in 12 months, is identifying how much CT requesting across Europe is appropriate according to guidelines. We will be able to improve the use of guidelines once the project has reported. Along those lines, we’re also distributing the ESR iGuide, our clinical decision support software, that helps clinicians and radiologists make the right decisions.

A multidisciplinary approach to medicine is another big one, because most of us work in multidisciplinary environments and if we don’t understand what our referring colleagues want from us, we won’t be able to give them what they need. Likewise, if they don’t understand how we do our jobs and what we’re capable of delivering, they may not make the best use of us when they request studies. So, multidisciplinary teams are key to a better future, and we will be rolling out initiatives to try and enhance that over the coming year.

HCB News: What is one of the best pieces of advice you have received as a professional?
AB:Two pieces of advice. One concerns how we don’t always get it right, and how we can’t always be expected to get it right. I’ve been quite interested in what people sometimes call “errors” in radiology. I like to think of them more as “discrepancies.”

Often in medicine, if things don’t turn out the way we expect them to turn out, we look back in hindsight and think we could have done something differently. We tend to be very self-critical. However, there is a huge amount of research that shows you cannot be right all the time. Medicine, and radiology in particular, is not a binary process. It is much more complex than that. We must allow ourselves to understand imperfection and not beat ourselves up over things that are reflections of humanity and the world in which we live.

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