The seed for this website was planted in October 2000, at the annual scientific meeting of the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Radiologists in Auckland, New Zealand.
Dr Harald Ostensen
At this meeting Dr Harald Ostensen representing the World Health Organisation and Professor Holger Pettersson representing the International Society of Radiology, asked the College to help establish a ‘Centre of Excellence for image interpretation by radiographers in the South Pacific’.
They had already set up the first centre in Nairobi in conjunction with the UK’s Royal College of Radiologists, and the second was underway in Cameroon in conjunction with France’s Societe Francaise de Radiologie. Drs Ostensen and Petterssen had plans for many more of these centres; they would all focus on ways to help radiographers in developing countries develop their skills in radiographic technique and quality assurance as well as image interpretation.
At the time radiographers interpreting images was quite a radical idea, and it was difficult for some radiologists to understand what was going on. “They should just train more radiologists” was one comment that I heard from several people, as if that was easy to do.
Professor Holger Pettersson
But the WHO/ISR idea was brilliant, for reasons that radiographers already know: in many of the world’s countries there are few if any radiologists, and those who are there mostly work in private practice reporting high-end imaging like CT or MRI.
So when the local doctor, or the clinical assistant or nurse, asks for an X-ray to be done, who do they expect to read it? Yes, I thought you’d say that: the radiographer. But many radiographers have never had any training in this skill!
I was excited by this idea, and volunteered to get involved.
There was never going to be an actual centre, with offices and staff; but we decided that we could run a course or workshop to teach qualified radiographers from the Pacific some basic principles about X-ray interpretation. And off we went.
‘We’ at this stage were a formidable team: the WHO was supplying most of the funding, but we also had support from the College and from the University of Newcastle in Australia, as well as the Fiji School of Medicine. A steering group met in Suva, Fiji, in 2003 to work out the details.
In early 2004 Harald Ostensen and I met with Tony Smith, a senior tutor in radiography from the University of Newcastle, and put together a syllabus. Then Tony and I went away and started creating the talks for a 2-week course.