Dear ultrasound friends,
In the last meeting in the Education & Professional Standards Committee (EPSC) in December, I was elected as new chairman of the committee. I feel greatly honoured to be selected for this important task and will work to promote European education in the field of ultrasonography. I will also take the opportunity to extend my gratitude to Dr. David Lindsell, the previous chairman of the EPSC, for his inspiring leadership of the Committee and for the work he has done for the best of EFSUMB and ultrasound education.
Ultrasound is the safest imaging modality there is in medicine. There is only one danger: Incompetence. The pitfall of ignoring obvious pathology or making the wrong diagnosis is much closer to the incompetent poorly educated. Accordingly, it is of great importance to ensure quality in education and sustain high professional standards in ultrasound scanning.
One way of working towards this aim has been over the last years to establish guidelines in ultrasound education for the different medical disciplines. The present EPSC will continue this work by completing already undertaken guidelines and stimulate new guidelines to be produced.
The EPS Committee has agreed to focus on the following tasks for the coming period:
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Promote more Euroson Schools to be arranged throughout Europe. The first Euroson School of EFSUMB was arranged in 1992 and since then 39 courses have been held. We encourage all the National Societies and ultrasound groups all over Europe to consider establishing a post-graduate course under the umbrella of a Euroson School. The EFSUMB secretariat and EPSC will do their best to support the new initiatives of Euroson Schools. A dedicated "start package" is being established to help the organisers of Euroson Schools. For more specific information look at www.efsumb.org., where the by-laws (these are under continuous improvement) of the Euroson School can be found. Do not hesitate to consider a Euroson School in your area of expertise or to take contact with EFSUMB or EPSC for a discussion.
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Promote production of educational material on the Web. An initiative to publish a case-of-the-month is already launched on our web-site. Furthermore, we will try to convert some of the educational CD-ROMs and DVDs to a suitable web format to increase its availability. Moreover, EPSC has the ambition to make the EFSUMB web-site an educational portal for ultrasound imaging. The idea is to establish an index of links to relevant web-sites which contain good and relevant educational material (text, images, videos). To be able to fulfil this task, EFSUMB will need dedicated people to search for and organise these links. As a start, we encourage our members to e-mail relevant ultrasound web-links and information about educational material that can be published to our General Secretary, Gianna Stanford (eMail: efsumb@efsumb.org).
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Explore the possibility of a common European course in basic ultrasound (level 1), where the course curriculum and content are made ready and standardised by EFSUMB. By providing a total course package, National Societies or local groups are enabled to run the courses.
We all need to keep in mind that if we think we have finished our education, we are not educated, but finished.
Wish you all a happy new year!
