Specialty should not be barrier to acquiring specific stroke training to safely perform thrombectomy

Martin Radvany (Little Rock, USA) and Joan Wojak (Lafayette, USA) tell Interventional News that there is a shortage of physicians that are trained to perform stroke thrombectomy and to look after patients after the procedure. It is vital for interventionists to acquire the education and training specific to stroke therapy, and the required technical skills before performing stroke thrombectomy safely. Both physicians opine that these are skills cannot be acquired “on a weekend course”; but specialty or pedigree, should not be a barrier to acquiring them, they say. The Society of Interventional Radiology (SIR) has just completed an update to its 2009 training guidelines for intra-arterial catheter-directed treatment of acute ischaemic stroke, and the document is currently undergoing revision, Radvany says.