Workshops are a great way to bring people together for focussed learning.
At a workshop you can learn or update a lot about the work that you do, and the science behind it.
You can meet colleagues and learn how they deal with the same problems - professional and political - as the ones you face.
You can catch up with old friends, and make new friends and contacts for the future.
You can have a break from your daily routines.
And if you’re lucky, you can have fun!
Kigali 2015.
And when you go home, you have new knowledge to apply.
And just the fact that you have attended a workshop is a sort of qualification, which can give you a boost of confidence in your dealings with colleagues and patients.
That’s all good.
But there are problems with workshops as well.
The biggest for me is that they are so short. Image interpretation is a big field, and getting good at it takes time.
And lectures are a famously limited way of teaching - about the worst, in fact, in terms of how much people can absorb. But because of the short time available, they are the only way I know of for covering a wide range of topics.
Not only that, but there will always be a range of experience among the participants. So for some it will be too easy, and for others not much use because they don’t have enough background knowledge to build on.
Workshops are very expensive to run when you add up the costs of travel, accommodation, food, and resources for a large group - especially if they are coming from a long way away (for example New Zealand!).
And the people who can actually get to a workshop are just a drop in the bucket when compared with the number who might like to go.
All these are bad enough. But workshops have another weakness: things could go horribly wrong when so much depends on one or two people. I had a short but quite severe illness a few days after the Kampala workshop, probably from food poisoning. It wasn’t dangerous but I was flattened for a day or two, and if it had happened during the workshop I would not have been able to teach. And we had no real plan B for that situation.
And then I thought I had lost my passport as I arrived to check in for the flight to Kigali . . . what a nightmare.
Sulueti in 2018.
Meanwhile, in the background to all the African activity, I had been receiving occasional emails from Sulueti Bauleka, a Fijian radiographer who had attended the 2004 and 2006 workshops and who had started work on the island of Nauru.
Every so often she would send, to me and Tony Smith (the other main presenter in the Fiji workshops), an X-ray which she had photographed with her phone asking for our opinion.
I thought the image quality was surprisingly good, and I enjoyed seeing some interesting cases and maybe making a small difference in Nauru.
This website cannot provide all the good things that flow from a workshop. But it is a much better teaching tool in many ways.
You can through it at your own speed, and re-visit any part of it as many times as you need to if there’s something you’re not sure about.
It has more depth than the workshops, with a lot more images and explanation.
It’s a low-pressure way to learn, and anybody anywhere can use it.
And thanks to Sulueti, you can interact with it as well!
I hope you enjoy the site and find it useful.