Dear ISBI Members and Friends,
A big hello to the international burn community. At ISBI, we continue to move forward to fulfill our previous president’s charge of getting closer to our membership around the world and our small but dedicated ISBI administrative team is helping on this journey.
I have some very exciting news to share with you regarding the ISBI Burn Center Assessment Program. We have selected 3 burn centers in Colombia and 1 burn center in Costa Rica for our first site to implement the ISBI Burn Center Assessment Program. We plan to visit these centers this summer. We have posted an educational webinar on the topic of the Burn Center Assessment Program. Please check out the Burn Center Assessment Program page to hear about the goals, mission, and objectives of the program (https://worldburn.org/assessment_program.aspx). We have already received 2 applications to consider for the 2026 program travel cycle! We will officially open the application for burn centers to apply for consideration of a 2026 visit on 1 September 2025. I encourage you to consider applying for this program! We would love to visit your burn center soon! One of the things we learned from the first cycle is that some burn centers might need help with the application. If you find the application difficult, please send in what you can, and we will contact you to help you complete it. Finally, many ISBI members have reached out to volunteer to be part one of the workgroups in the program. Thank you! We will be opening a new call for volunteers later this year.
You may know by now that Dr. Steve Wolf, Editor of BURNS and Dr. David Greenhalgh, Editor of Burns Open have completed their tenure. I would like to publicly thank them for a job well done! After an open and thorough search, we have found two new exciting editors to take up the mantle of leadership for these journals: Dr. Leopoldo Cancio is our new Editor of BURNS and Dr. Anthony Papp is our new Editor of Burns Open. They are dedicated to continuing to evolve and grow our journals. One area that they would like your help is volunteering to be reviewers in the very important peer review process. If you are interested, please reach out to them to volunteer.
ISBI wants to represent the international burn community and especially the burn communities in low and middle resource countries. In my September posting, I reported that for the first time in our history more of our members are from low and middle resource countries than from high-resource countries. ISBI wants this trend to continue. To further this trend, the ISBI Board of Directors has decided to reduce membership fees for low- and middle-income countries so that more people can join our society. We will be posting the new ISBI membership dues structure on the website soon.
One area for growth in our society and one area that we need to gain representation from is the nursing, rehabilitation and other ancillary services groups. We are currently a physician heavy organization, but we don’t want to remain this way. We have asked our current nursing and rehabilitation members for suggestions on how to grow representation from these groups and they have some very productive ideas. You will be hearing more on this topic in coming Presidential Postings. Until then, my hope is that our membership continues to grow!
I would like to let everyone know that preparations for the upcoming Regional ISBI meeting in Thessaloniki, Greece on December 3-4, 2025 are well underway. Please visit our website to find more information about the conference and to submit your abstracts for podium presentations. I would like to personally invite you to attend the conference in Thessaloniki, Greece!
Also, on the horizon is the ISBI Congress in Santiago, Chile in October 2026. We will again be offering financial assistance for our members to attend the meeting, but to qualify for these scholarships you will need to be an ISBI member for a minimum of 2 consecutive years. I urge you to keep up with your membership dues. If you are not yet a member, apply for membership NOW in 2025 so that we can help you come to Chile for the 2026 Congress!
Finally, I invite you all to visit the ISBI website frequently and follow us on social media for announcements on upcoming webinars.
I hope to get to meet you all in person during one of the upcoming ISBI meetings.
Thank you for supporting ISBI!
Sincerely,
David Harrington, MD
ISBI President