North American Spine Society patient-safety statement sets training and competency standards for spine interventions.

North American Spine Society guidance: structural spine interventions—fusion, decompression, sacroiliac fusion, structural vertebral implants, and paddle leads—require formal surgical spine training; nonstructural procedures need structured education and competency assessment.

• The 2026 North American Spine Society patient-safety position statement covers education, training, and competency for minimally invasive, endoscopic, percutaneous, and implant-based spine interventions and does not itself define or restrict scope of practice.
• Structural procedural categories are reserved for physicians with formal surgical spine training: spinal fusion/permanent stabilization, direct spinal cord/nerve root decompression, lateral sacroiliac fusion, vertebral augmentation with structural vertebral implants beyond cement/bone graft, and spinal cord stimulator paddle leads.
• Nonstructural procedures—basivertebral nerve ablation, percutaneous neuromodulation, cement/bone-graft vertebral augmentation, and endoscopic branch neurectomy—should require structured procedure-specific education, supervised experience, appropriate minimum case numbers, and competency assessment.

Automated summary

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