Dear ISBI Members and Friends,
A hearty hello to all the members of the ISBI. I am David Harrington, a burn surgeon from Brown Health in Providence, RI, USA, and it is my pleasure to welcome you to the ISBI website. I will be reaching out quarterly to our community for the next two years in my role as ISBI president to keep you updated in the happenings of your society.
I first want to thank Folke Sjoberg for his service as president of the society. He was instrumental in putting together a remarkable and successful meeting in Birmingham in August of this year with 1,200+ attendees, which makes it the third largest ISBI meeting of all time. The program was built to highlight the challenges of low and middle resource countries. The feedback from our members in past meetings was a desire for more audience participation so he introduced a polling platform for all symposiums and the feedback has been very positive. Folke was also a great mentor to me and prepared me well for my new role. Thank you, Folke!
Since the strategic analysis during Naiem Moiemen’s ISBI presidency we have rewritten our mission statement and amended our bylaws, to make our society palpably more involved in the challenges of burn care worldwide. We hope to fulfill our mission, “To reduce the global burden of burns and improve burn care.” What was striking about our most recent analysis of our membership was that for the first time we have more members from low and middle-resource countries than from high income countries. This change is a very welcome one. It is a change that we will meet by bringing valuable content to our meetings and by having smaller yearly regional meetings between the biennial Congresses. Another change is the start of the ISBI Burn Center Assessment program. This program currently has 4 workgroups preparing for our first visits to burn centers in 2025. We hope this program will allow us to give the burn centers we visit a pathway for change and improvement along with the continuous support and coaching to meet their identified goals.
There is growth and change in the ISBI. We have expanded the number and scope of our committees to fulfill necessary new roles in our society and improve the experience of our members. We were pleased that over 100 people volunteered to serve on the various ISBI committees this year. In addition to the efforts of the Assessment group (Guidelines and Outcomes Committee), led by Cagri Uysal, you will be seeing the efforts of the Disaster Committee (led by Jason Woods and Jimmy Jeng), Nursing Committee (led by Chinenye Anetekhai and Michelle Hughes), Education Committee (led by Mark Fisher and Athina Lavrentieva), Rehabilitation Committee (led by Deborah Knight and Yu-Li Sung), Research Committee (led by Fiona Wood and Simon Booth) and Burn Care Committee (led by Claudia Malic and Suvashis Dash).
I want to thank the ISBI membership for their efforts on behalf of the Society. We have lots to do!
In closing, I want to let everyone know that preparations for the 23rd Congress of the ISBI to be held in Santiago, Chile in October 2026 are well underway.
Sincerely,
David Harrington, MD
ISBI President