04/08/2025
After finishing up the maximum term of four years as President of IRSA, I passed the baton on at last week’s Annual General Meeting to the extremely capable and eloquent Dr Brendan Buckley from Auckland NZ. It’s great to have NZ represented strongly and I’m confident the society is in good hands with the new executive team.
During the years leading the society I tried to work from the following principles and philosophies:
1. Unity and collaboration:
I genuinely believe more progress is made when focussing on commonalities and mutual value creation. Especially in a small niche like IR we need to look for every opportunity to work together internally and with collaborating specialists and emphasise the positive aspects. We compete with lack of awareness and lagging systems, never each other.
2. Implement quickly, iterative improvements and idea meritocracy.
All ideas should be evaluated regardless of source. A society like IRSA can act quickly on new ideas for progress and embrace iterative improvements rather than a perfect plan at the outset. IR continuously evolves and therefore requires an equally agile and adaptable support system. Perfect is never reached in a vacuum, only through feedback cycles and refinement in real life implementation.
3. Lack of awareness is the main barrier to interventional radiology’s ability to positively impact medicine and society.
I wouldn’t have taken on this role if I didn’t genuinely believe that image guided minimally invasive procedures offered by IR could dramatically improve the lives of patients, help referring docs solve difficult problems as well as help the health system in general get people back to health and back to enjoying life sooner.
These great outcomes are commonplace to practicing IRs, but many patients and doctors are unaware of all the options and innovations offered within the sphere of IR. I felt and still feel passionately in the need for broader awareness re all the progress being made and how these procedures can help people and doctors solve their problems. I’ll continue to try to work aspect on this as past president and I’m always pleasantly surprised at the level of interest I encounter when teaching and speaking about IR to doctors and patient groups alike.
I want to extend heartfelt thanks to my executive team, secretariat and all the members of IRSA who have contributed their ideas and effort to help make the great progress we’ve seen over the past 4 years as a society and area of specialist practice.
