Vision 20/20 – RRFS perspective
by Giovanni Di Liberto on behalf of RRFS Office
Building the Future of Neurology is for the RRFS Office a unique opportunity to improve neurology education, ameliorate patient care and promote scientific advancements in the field of neurology.
Of course, this cannot happen without active participation and support of neurology residents, research fellows and collaboration with the European Academy of Neurology that constantly supports our section.
We assisted in the last years an impressive growing interest among neurology residents and researchers to become part of our “Home of Neurology”, the EAN. This is for the RRFS an honour but also a huge responsibility to continue providing a better environment for neurology education and promote excellence in our field.
For this aim, EAN and RRFS are continuously exchanging ideas and feedbacks to identify the best strategies to cultivate the talents of thousands of European Neurologists and keeping pace with the evolving landscape of our specialty.
In this regard, Neurology has faced terrific advances in the diagnosis and treatment of conditions once considered either with a poor prognosis or harbouring a dramatic impact on quality of life of our patients. This is definitely a great achievement requiring a constant effort especially for young neurologists who have to face the challenge of an expanding and evolving discipline, but also identify unmet clinical needs and propose novel approaches further advancing our knowledge.
Therefore, an increase in the neurology workforce is critical to meet the demands but this is unfortunately accompanied by numerous factors that contributed to the rise of burn-out cases among neurology residents worldwide. Identifying and mitigating these factors may help meet the future demand of neurologists and improve their work-life balance. For this reason, we plan to conduct a survey about this issue in the upcoming months.
One of the key resources of the RRFS are that it can take advantage of the experience coming from heterogenous working and education environment within European countries and this definitely enriches our vision about Neurology. In 2016, this vision motivated the developing a network of EAN-RRFS national representatives (NRN) which is a powerful tool to spread information, promote professional growth and has already conducted surveys to gather information about Neurology education across Europe.
In addition, in collaboration with EAN, our goal is to offer the opportunity to learn, focus on a specific area of interest and experience different approaches or even health care systems via Clinical and Research Fellowship grants, but also autumn and summer Schools.
This will hopefully boost the progress in the understanding of neurologic disorders and improving patient care in Europe in the next years.
On behalf of the RRFS Office, we are looking forward meeting our colleagues at the next EAN congress in Paris.
