For spine surgeon Shaleen Vira, MD, 2026 will be a time of growth at Banner Health as his team looks to expand and strengthen its presence in the Phoenix region.
Dr. Vira is chief of orthopedic spine surgery with Phoenix-based Banner University Medical Center, and he has seen increases in spine patient volume. He joined the “Becker’s Spine and Orthopedic Podcast” to discuss growth and building a strong team to keep up with demand.
Note: This is an edited excerpt.
Question: Can you talk about how you see your role with the spine department at Banner evolving? What does growth look like to you in 2026?
Dr. Shaleen Vira: As we grow different sites of service across the region and across Arizona, we’re having people meet that demand at different points. We are growing as a service line. We’re actively recruiting surgeons. We function very well with our neurosurgery colleagues. The neurosurgery department has certainly grown in terms of their service line, and coordinating with them has been a great joy.
Part of the growth for 2026 is going to be increasing our capacity to do surgery at different sites of service. And part of it is to continue to increase new technologies and incorporate new technologies at the different sites of service.
Q: What’s your strategy for recruiting and keeping spine surgeons and physicians?
SV: We’re really growing a good collaborative environment, good jovial environment and looking for people with camaraderie and who work well in a large institutional setting. We’re hiring carefully and hiring people who’ve had great training. We have people in our faculty who train at all the best places around the country, and who want to be in a very exciting part of the country. Phoenix and Scottsdale and the surrounding areas are a great place for people to live, raise families, so there’s been no shortage of people interested.
We have people who are really good at minimally invasive surgery and different people who are really good at intradural surgery, spinal cord surgery. And we have different people who are really traditional deformity-trained like myself. Just as a football team or an NBA basketball team is formed, we try to recruit all-stars who touch the different areas of spine.
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