Back to Nuclear Medicine Business

After a turbulent time for me personally since losing mammy in February, this month I’m getting back to Nuclear Medicine business, and to be honest, it feels good. I would like to say thank you to everyone who took the time to send me a message after my last blog. Hearing your stories of similar experiences and reading your condolences made me feel less alone and really helped a lot. So thanks – it was a lovely example of what a close community we are fortunate to be part of within the BNMS.

Something else that highlighted the unique strength of our organisation to me came from an invitation from the Dutch Embassy to speak at an event they were organising in London. Excitingly, this was called ‘Innovation Mission to London, United Kingdom’ and was organised by the Netherlands Enterprise Agency. It sounded like something straight out of Star Trek, which I love, so immediately felt right up my street. (I was raised on a solid diet of Sci-Fi by my dad, with a healthy dollop of John Wayne / Clint Eastwood westerns thrown into the mix and a side order or Rogers and Hammerstein. It was an eclectic mix.)

The event took place at the London Institute of Healthcare Engineering, which is located right next to the Thames. After a short introduction we were served lunch on the 3rd floor which led onto outside tables overlooking Westminster Palace and Big Ben. Happily, the sun came out and gave a welcoming impression for our visitors and for the first time in several weeks, brought a smile to my face.

The afternoon talks were designed to promote knowledge exchange and discussion, and as part of this I was asked to give a presentation on the BNMS. At first, I wasn’t quite sure how to pitch it, but once I started talking about what BNMS does, I realised afresh how much our Society actually does.

Whilst we have good links with the European Association of Nuclear Medicine, we also have a very strong individual identity and community of our own. The BNMS provides guidance and leadership, and I’ll give you a couple of good examples. I try not to mention the B-work (Brexit – there, I said it), but we worked hard with our Industry colleagues and the Royal College of Radiologists to successfully engage the government in the lead up to the change in our border controls. This minimised the disruption to patients that Brexit could have caused. And although it wasn’t perfect, and there were financial implications, we didn’t see the chaos that was definitely possible. Moving to flights for shipment of radioisotopes from abroad has its challenges but was definitely preferable to deliveries being stuck in a queue for the channel tunnel or the short straits ferry crossings.

I hope you found the guidance we wrote during covid useful, which was another good example of the benefits of having a national Society providing helpful leadership and of how engaged, proactive and helpful our members are. This was a collaborative piece of work put together by colleagues at Birmingham City Hospital and Liverpool Royal along with BNMS Council members.

The BNMS has important links to other partners organisations, which we utilise to take forward the Nuclear Medicine agenda. Hopefully these links have benefitted you, even if you’ve not been aware of the work being done behind the scenes. In both the above examples, they were vitally important. Currently we are trying our best to take forward registration for technologists and to maintain standards for PET CT commissioning, amongst other things.

As well as our main Council, we also have a number of special interest groups. These include the Professional Standards Committee, which brings you our guidelines, amongst other things. Although we do cross-reference EANM guidelines, we also write our own BNMS guidelines, tapping into experts practicing within the UK and they’re really good.

We have our Scientific and Education Committee which as well as overseeing a year-round programme of regional educational meetings and webinars, they bring you your brilliant national meetings. These give us a valuable opportunity to share good practice and develop our own networks, as well as being interesting and generally good fun. Many other countries in Europe don’t have this. Of course, they have the EANM conference, which is amazing, but there’s a lot to be said for something that is smaller and more focused on local practice and issues.

We have our Research and Innovation Committee which aims to bring together new and experienced researchers from different departments across the UK, establishing research champions and linking in with other bodies who promote research. This important group provides support to researchers, who may otherwise be a little isolated as well as encouraging trainees and leading on registries. They are looking at setting up a database of Nuclear Medicine clinical trials, which will provide a valuable overview on work taking place in our country.

And last but definitely not least, we have our recently established BNMS UK MRT Consortium, which was formed after a merger of the BNMS Molecular Radiotherapy Group and the UK MRT Consortium. This new group is working to engage stakeholders to improve equity of access to MRT across the country, to provide a space for knowledge exchange, shared learning and collaboration, including development of MRT guidance, to monitor MRT services across the country, to help with expansion and training of the workforce and to link in with research groups to promote MRT research. This is an ambitious ask, and we are only at the beginning of what needs to be done. To take this forward, we have established a number of workstreams, each led by a passionate MRT advocate, with the aspiration that this country will be a world leader in MRT in the future.

We try to ensure we have good links with all our craft groups, and although I think this is something that could be improved even further, the links we have with the Radiographers, Technologists and Nurses through the BNMS RTN Group, with the Clinical Scientists and Clinical trainees, and with the UK Radiopharmacy Group are very good. I would like us to improve on our 2-way communication, so it is a little less top down and makes better provision for listening to members. Nuclear Medicine is a team sport and within the BNMS we all get to play an equally important and recognised part. As a Radiopharmacist I’ve always felt valued within the society, and I hope all of you feel the same. If not, please let us know how we could do this better.

We have our BNMS website, which provides a platform for us to share guidance and news with our members, as well as being a good vehicle for administering our scientific and educational agenda. And unlike many other countries, we have our own official journal, Nuclear Medicine Communications. I must give a huge thank you to all our contributors, editors and our wonderful editor-in-chief.

I have to conclude with a mention for our brilliant permanent staff, without whom none of the above would be possible. Our CEO, Charlotte Weston, our BNMS Committees Secretary, Caroline Oxley and our newest staff member, Angelica Spina who is providing valuable admin support. They are all fantastic and work so hard on behalf of all of us.

Please don’t underestimate how good this all is. If you can remember my first ever blog, I made reference to BNMS being good for your health. This is because I’m grateful to our society for so many things, and being grateful is good for your wellbeing. After the events of recent weeks, reminding myself of this has given me a welcome lift. I hope it does the same for you. And talking about positive things, our Spring conference is just round the corner. Please do try to join me in Belfast next month and be part of the BNMS Community!

Ms Jilly Croasdale

BNMS President