British Society of Interventional Radiology

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British Society of Interventional Radiology

The British Society of Interventional Radiology is a charitable foundation founded to promote and develop the practice of Interventional Radiology.

The BSIR is a charitable foundation founded to promote and develop the practice of Interventional Radiology

The objects of the Society are the advancement of education in interventional radiology and the provision of further facilities for education and research in interventional radiology

02/03/2026

International Women’s Day Panel Event
Tuesday 10 March at 8pm - Live on BSIR LinkedIn

Join us for a live panel discussion celebrating women in Interventional Radiology. This event will explore the experiences of women across every stage of the profession, including trainees, consultants and allied health professionals.

International Women’s Day Panel Event
Tuesday 10 March at 8pm
Live on LinkedIn

Join us for a live conversation celebrating women in Interventional Radiology and exploring experiences across every stage of the profession, from trainees to consultants to allied health professionals.

Moderator:
-Dr Alex Barnacle, Paediatric IR, Great Ormond Street Hospital

Panel:
- Dr Madhu Chetan, Post CCT IR ST6, Oxford University Hospitals
- Dr Winnie Liu, Consultant Interventional Radiologist, University Hospitals Coventry and Warwickshire
- Sarah Locker, Advanced Clinical Practitioner in Interventional Radiology, Royal Preston Hospital
- Dr Chloe Mortensen, Consultant Interventional Radiologist
- Dr Sammy Rostampour, Consultant Interventional Radiologist, Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust
- Dr Katrina Harborne, IR Consultant, Worcestershire Acute NHS Trust

This discussion is open to everyone working in IR and we strongly encourage allies to join us.

As part of and , we will explore what a truly diverse, equitable and inclusive IR community looks like and what practical steps help us move closer to that goal.

Our audience is everyone working in IR. We hope to see trainees, junior consultants, senior clinicians and allies join the conversation. Gender equality in our specialty benefits us all.

In the spirit of and , we will reflect on what a truly equitable and inclusive IR community looks like, and what practical steps help us move closer to that goal.

We would love your input!
What questions would you like the panel to answer?
What topics should we make sure we cover?

Add your questions in the comments and join us live on 10 March.

02/03/2026

Webinar tomorrow
Join us on Tuesday 3 March at 1pm for the next session in the new weekly webinar series developed in collaboration with BSIR.

This session will focus on Gynae and will be delivered by Dr Krishna Prasad Bellam Premnath, Consultant IR at BHRUT.

The series covers the core components of the first three years of the The Royal College of Radiologists clinical radiology curriculum and is delivered by experts from each Special Interest Group. Sessions run every Tuesday at 1pm via Zoom from September 2025 to July 2026.

Attendance is free for UK based members and non members, with registration required. Recordings will be available on RCR Learn within two weeks for all UK and global RCR members and Fellows.

Register now to join tomorrow’s session - https://tinyurl.com/48vk6bzp

01/03/2026

Some more amazing feedback from last years VITALS - are you joining us this year?

Find out more: https://www.bsir.org/events/VITALS

28/02/2026

Who is the most interesting person you have met at a BSIR event?
The IR community brings together specialists, innovators and colleagues from across the UK. These connections often shape our careers, our thinking and the way we practise.

Share the person who has inspired you or influenced your journey. Add to the comments and feel free to tag them to show your appreciation.

26/02/2026

And that's a wrap.
Well, apart from oncall. As well as the nine of us there are three other slots on our on-call rota currently as it is a regional oncall covering a large portion of the West of Scotland. There are two IR nurses on-call (one to scrub and one to administer sedation/circulate) and one IR radiographer for each site as we have two acute sites.

The move from one in six as a registrar to one in twelve as a Consultant was seismic and massively improved my quality of life. Our IR registrars join IR on-call once they've completed their FRCR exams. This means the registrar aspect of the rota is rarely full and the IR Consultant is first on whenever there is a gap.

We cover bleeding and infective emergencies with the occasional "urgent not emergent" weekend day time case too. This includes emergency EVAR and TIPS as well as the very rare paediatric call. One of the strengths of our department in my opinion is that you can always call someone for help.

My colleagues know they can discuss paediatric cases out of hours with me and I know I can phone them when I need advice on sizing that TEVAR. One big dysfunctional family!

26/02/2026

And then we make it to Friday. Friday mornings are our vascular MDT and then IR education session. The education session can be interesting cases, journal club, "what I've learned" presentations from registrars who've been on study leave or industry led teaching. We recently did a basic surgical skills session for our registrars who'd asked for this and we very much see these sessions as led by what our registrars feel are gaps in their on the job learning.

I am our IR morbidity and mortality lead and we have M&M meeting for our education session approximately once per month. These are totally invaluable for discussion and learning for everyone and are attended by IR nursing and radiography staff routinely with occasional guest appearances from other specialities. Twice a year we have a joint meeting with vascular surgery to discuss hybrid cases. A learning and action email follows the meeting to highlight any pearls or things we need to take forward.

Friday afternoons are probably the most variable part of my week. One a month I have my own IR clinic where I see both adult and paediatric patients face to face to discuss potential procedures with them and I can do an ultrasound in clinic for them too. Once a month I do a walk in/awake feeding tube change list in paeds for children who require jejunal access. If I've been in for joint clinic on the Wednesday, I try and swap my off site day for that week to the Friday. The others I do some cold vascular reporting or review and sign off vascular reports the registrars have sent to me.

Pictured is our seminar room where we do MDT and education and our IR doctors room beside the labs where usually several people can be found, particularly on a Friday. About once every six weeks one of us has a breakdown and cleans it up. It's been a while. We also have a shared IR Consultants office and my desk I reckon has the most personality. We generally don't take ourselves too seriously as a group. Casing point: I arrived one day to find a mask and cape on my desk from my clinical lead. He said it was superhero, I think I came off more bank robber.

26/02/2026

On a Thursday morning I actually do some diagnostic reporting! I've kept an acute CT session which I really enjoy and we've got a great skill mix in my session with MSK, GI and chest experience that I get to learn from. We usually have a couple of registrars with us too at a mixture of stages.

Thursday afternoon is theoretically a session of SPA but it's not uncommon that I'm headed round to paeds again (following the arrows!) for an emergency list case. Perhaps a drainage or a tumour biopsy. I am an ES, CS and co-lead for IR education and training so this is when I tend to have meetings for those things or be arranging/ planning our education sessions. I am very fortunate in that I've had quite a lot of opportunity to give teaching, training and lectures including at events like BSIR ASM, paeds IR UK and CIRSE. I participate in our local 2A teaching programme and have been involved in organising medical student electives and having a CIRSE fellow in our department.

As incoming chair of the BSIR Comms committee, our most recent meeting was this past Thursday evening. These are a good mixture of productive and banter usually and with good organisation and people doing what they say they will, not too many meetings or long meetings are required.

26/02/2026

Wednesday is usually an off-site day for me. This week I got a giant strawberry macaroon. I do a half day work from home which is usually a combination of emails, QIP, CPD, service development admin and dealing with any training and education issues.

Twice in the last three weeks though I've been onsite for vascular anomaly MDT clinics. Currently IR attends paediatric clinics with ENT/dermatology and plastic surgery/dermatology. These are brilliant because families get to see all the specialities that will be involved in their care all at once, we can ultrasound in clinic and discuss medical treatments, sclerotherapy and surgery rather than multiple appointments and potentially confusing messages. I am currently working with some colleagues in IR and plastic surgery to start a similar clinic for the adult cohort.

The multidisciplinary working in IR is so essential. To run a list we need our team of IR nurses and radiographers as well as Consultants and registrars but our service would completely fall apart without our excellent healthcare support workers who run our stock room and admin staff who arrange all the bookings, patient transport and deal with the clinic admin we produce. Great working relationships are also required across specialties and in a regular week I would interact with vascular surgery, gastro, urology, renal, HPB, anaesthetic teams, ED staff, critical care staff and plastic surgery. The variety of specialities, procedures and people is one of the best bits of the job for me.

26/02/2026

On a Tuesday I do an all day adult IR list and alternate between our two acute sites to do this. At Glasgow Royal Infirmary the bulk of the work is biliary and urological procedures with some GI while the QEUH lists tend to have more vascular and renovascular cases. We are a cohort of 9 full time IR Consultants in Glasgow and we all do vascular and non-vascular procedures. Most of us then have a more "specialist" area and for myself, I do vascular malformations work and a wider range of feeding tube procedures than the majority of my colleagues so I often have one of these cases on my list too.

We have our own "ten bed area" within our IR department in the QEUH which leads through to our two IR labs with a central control room. This is great for patient flow and means we can do daycase procedures easily. There are also two hybrid theatres within the main surgery department and we do procedures in these every day with our vascular surgery colleagues or with the CEPOD anaesthetic team.

26/02/2026

Mondays are my earlier start day. I do a paediatric GA list in the morning so I have to be in to check bloods and see the children and their families before the brief at 8.45am. We usually manage three cases easily and sometimes do a fourth. Most common procedures are biopsies, per oral feeding tube work and sclerotherapy but we also do things like varicocele embolisation, RFA for osteoid osteoma and arterial procedures on this list. At the moment the paediatric IR involvement in central venous access is minimal as we have a great anaesthetic team who run a lines list so we focus on other procedures but sometimes we will add on a line to help out.

Each theatre space in the children's hospital has an animal character and for our paediatric IR lab this is Ollie the Owl. The theatre corridors are decorated like you're sailing down a canal on the bed and you can spot the animals as you go. We also have stickers of the characters and I have an Ollie sticker on my laptop. Among others.

In the afternoon, I cover IR duty. This is highly variable but typically involves answering calls, vetting requests and discussing cases. Sometimes there is an emergency case such as an embolization at our other acute site or even in obstetrics.

One of my favourite examples of how varied my job and my Mondays can be is that I once inserted a PICC in a 5kg infant in the morning then walked down the corridor and did an EVAR for a patient in their 70's in the afternoon!

26/02/2026

A WEEK IN THE LIFE OF: DR LINDA WATKINS

It's my turn to share some more detailed insights into my life as an interventional radiologist. My name is Dr Linda Watkins and I work in NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde covering a wide range of both adult and paediatric IR as well as having some other roles too. This means that each week can look quite different and I need to be pretty organised but I get bored easily so that's definitely a good thing for me.

I mainly work at the Queen Elizabeth University Hospital Campus and this incorporates both the adult hospital (big tall chunky building on the left) and the Royal Hospital for Children (curved building in the middle of the picture). The green building to the right is the campus labs.

The adult and children's hospitals being combined has advantages for me as I don't even need to get wet going between the two - our main IR department is on the same level as the paediatric theatres where the paeds IR lab is - so it's easy to go between the two to see patients, discuss cases with clinicians and do procedures.

Address

London
WC2A3JW

Website

http://www.bsir.org/

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