HealthManagement, Volume 9 - Issue 3, 2009
In other MIR news, the association held its first junior workshop in late July 2009. The course is aimed at new consultants, or those about to seek or take up a consultant post. A "consultant" is a British term equivalent to the Nor th American staff grade post, which means a definitive, substantive medical appointment: the highest grade of doctor within the National Health Service hospital-based practice in the UK.
The course was entitled "What you Need to Know at the Start of Your Consultant Career", and lectures were general rather than imaging- specific, and thus applicable to consultants in any medical or surgical discipline, wishing to learn about key management issues they will encounter from the start of their consultant careers.
The course dealt with issues including:
• How to organise your professional working life: negotiating your job plan, improving your curriculum vitae, dealing with being oncall, reasons for doing research;
• Departmental issues: departmental timetabling, avoiding a dysfunctional department, appointing a new colleague;
• Issues with a heavy managerial administrative component: setting up a new service, writing a business case;
• Issues involving colleagues: disciplinary issues, responsibilities involved in training junior doctors, what the family doctor/general practitioner is looking for from a referral service;
• Private practice: building up a personal private practice, what to do and what not to do in private practice;
• Broader, more general issues affecting consultants: medico-legal practice - how to avoid being sued on the one hand, and choosing to engage in medico-legal work on the other and what this entails; reasons for involving oneself in medical politics, and the consequences if you don't, and
• Teleradiology and telemedicine and their increasing impact on modern imaging and medical practice: how medical imaging professionals can protect their careers from it, and how to provide the added value necessary to remain competitive.
The course proved successful and popular. The speakers, all experienced, well-established consultants, were outstanding. They included heads of departments, medical executives and business managers, and current and past officers of the Royal College of Radiologists of the UK, as well as 'jobbing' radiologists with a wealth of practical experience of the real world at consultant level.
The course is to be repeated in 2010 by popular demand, and further information will be forthcoming in IMAGING Management as well as on the MIR and ESR websites: www.mir-online.org, www.myesr.org
