Hello ISBI Members and Friends
I want to draw everyone’s attention to the upcoming World Burns Week. This is the 2nd year of World Burns Week which is critical to the mission of raising awareness of burn injury. Last year’s conference reached 95 countries and over a thousand people. Let’s make sure it reaches more people this year. World Burns Week launches 3-7 November 2025 and the week is chock full of webinars with great content. You can get there though the ISBI website. Please click the link on the website, to sign up.
The ISBI Burn Center Assessment Program completed its first trip a few weeks ago. We visited 3 burn centers in Colombia and one in Costa Rica. We had a multi-disciplinary team of MDs, nurses and therapists rigorously assess the centers. The centers we visited did a great job preparing for the visit. We hope the burn centers learned more about their center capabilities and what their roadmap for improvement looks like. I know our team learned a lot about the state of burn care in the countries we visited. Our ISBI teams are now hard at work finalizing the reports that we will send to the centers in a few weeks, and all the workgroups are busy updating all the application materials and recommendations for the trips in 2026. You will see the Call for Participation in the ISBI Burn Center Assessment Program on the website in a few weeks (September) and we hope to announce the next centers we will visit by late December or early January of next year. We would love to visit your center! Go to the website, read the material on the program, listen to the published webinar, and consider answering the call to participate!
We are delighted to share the 2024 ISBI Annual Report. Annual Reports can be viewed under About ISBI on the website at the following link: https://worldburn.org/isbi_annual_reports.aspx. Additionally, we are in the final stages of upgrading the ISBI website! The new and refreshed website will allow for more educational content and greater membership connectivity. Please navigate the website, poke around, perhaps edit your profile. Is your email up to date? Do you have a new position? The ISBI community wants to know. We will make an announcement of the new site launch soon!
The program and other useful information for the 2025 ISBI Regional Conference in Thessaloniki, Greece is posted on the website. Please consider attending what promises to be a great conference in December (12/3-12/4, 2025).
Preparations are well underway for the 2026 ISBI Congress in Santiago, Chile; October 11-15, 2026. The venue has been confirmed as the Intercontinental Hotel in Santiago. Industry booth space and Sponsorships reservations will open on October 1, 2025. For more information about the 2026 congress, please visit our website.
Dear Friends, it has almost been a year since my first posting as your ISBI president, and I want to give my thanks to the Society for this role. I am proud of the members who volunteer their time to advance burn care worldwide, and the Society, who is actively reaching out into the world to connect with those who care for burn survivors. Finally, as I start my second year as your president, I am honored to be in the company of AB Wallace, John Boswick, Jose Banuelos, Basil Pruitt, David Heimbach, Naoki Aikawa, David Herndon, Mehmet Haberal, Ronald Tomkins, David Mackie, Richard Gamelli, Rajeev Ahuja, William Cioffi, Naiem Moiemen, David Greenhalgh and Folke Sjoberg.
Stay safe!
Sincerely,
David Harrington, MD
ISBI President