I’m delighted to say that after almost two decades of running them, a milestone 10,000th attendee joined the in-person national training courses earlier this summer.
As always, really grateful for those who help run these non-profit sessions, suggest content and provide the regular updates from around the UK. Although born during the NPfIT era, they still seem to be valued by the country.
Many readers here have been emailing or messaging about the waiting list or to ask for new dates, so this is just a quick update to say that I’m working on them now and will post again in a few days.
Sorry it has been a bit quiet on the updates recently - with a fair few PACS Managers retiring or moving to other professions this year there’s been a push in demand for the training courses. An update on these as promised - all places are filled on the public session dates up to January 2025. We’re running sessions almost every weekend all across the country so apologies to those who are sitting on the waiting list for a slot. If you’re a Trust or Consortium wanting to run the session locally, please get in touch as these are much easier to arrange than the mixed sessions.
However, as a result of the ‘queue’, I’ve opened up the UKIO 2025 weekend places for booking and will post the links to these shortly. As usual we will try to hire out sufficient space to accommodate several hundred attendees on those days. Hopefully by making these available for booking much earlier than usual it will help those wanting a place to be able to arrange travel, funding and hotels etc via bursaries or Trust funding in good time.
We’ve also made some wider changes to the sessions available for a couple of reasons:
A new 0.5 day AI basics training session will be available from early 2025 to allow for compliance with the new HCPC practice requirements for Radiographers. This will be priced at the £25-£50 mark depending on venue.
The GDPR for Radiology Personnel 0.5 day session is being retired and will last be delivered in January 2025. The slightly longer 1 day GDPR Essentials will remain but will now be offered on Fridays or Mondays rather than weekends to allow those attending the HL7 + DICOM sessions to attend more easily too.
The skills assessments for non-manager PACS Professionals will be changing to the new format from April 2025.
The practical skills assessments for PACS Managers will be available from April 2025.
Some of the sessions we run in Jersey and Guernsey will now include PRINCE2 v7 Foundation (thanks to our French trainer qualifying to instruct this) at no significant extra cost.
Assessment certificates issued since June 2024 have a slightly altered design. This is, a little strangely, due to more forgeries of the course certificates in the year 2023-2024 being detected by Trusts than any other previous year. As a result we’ve made some technical changes to the watermark on the security paper used, the paper will now include UV ‘flecks’ across the entirety of the results section plus a new more complex hologram with updated embossed text has been introduced. Following feedback, the inks we use will no longer be delible. The validation ‘stamp’ will also be updated. These are the first changes to the certificates in 8 years - if you’re used to seeing our original certificates when screening job applicants, please let your teams know they look slightly different now. The verification service remains unchanged and available if there are any concerns over a candidates credentials.