Impressions of Belfast

As most of you will be aware (and if not, we didn’t shout about it loudly enough!) the BNMS held it’s Spring meeting this year in Belfast. We originally booked this venue back in 2019, with a view to holding our 2021 meeting there, but COVID struck, and life changed in many ways for us all.

Happily, we were able to reschedule, and so fast track to 2024, and here we are. I was a bit worried at the time of booking that people may not want to go to Belfast; it involves arranging a flight, for a start. And it would be disingenuous not to acknowledge its difficult history, which I did wonder may put some people off. But it certainly didn’t, and for good reason, as Belfast really is a wonderful city. It has such a friendly vibe, and in many ways does feel like a more compact Dublin. But in my opinion, Belfast is very much a great city in its own right, so although I love Dublin, my comparisons will stop there.

The conference centre is located on the banks of the River Lagan, a short walk from the city centre. There are many lovely restaurants – the people of Belfast enjoy good food – and a lot of interesting things to do. I went over on the Friday evening, and amazingly, enjoyed beautiful weather for the weekend (this doesn’t happen that often, believe me – Northern Ireland colleagues will agree.)

Some of the film locations for Game of Thrones can be found across Northern Ireland. This is, in my opinion one of the best TV series of all time - although I swear, if they’d killed off Tyrion I would have stopped watching. (Spoiler alert – no-one was safe from getting the chop!) Belfast has celebrated its connection with GoT by installing huge stained glass murals depicting different moments from the series, so I had a nice walk along the river finding them all. This was followed up by a couple of pints of Guinness in a sunny beer garden in the City Centre. And the Guinness tasted great, especially after a couple of hours walking in the hot sunshine working up a thirst!

There is also the Titanic Museum, which was very interesting. Although the Titanic maiden voyage resulted in awful tragedy, the museum didn’t just focus on that. It also looked more widely at ship building and other related industries for which Belfast was then well known. This was followed by another Guinness (the sharp eyed among you may have spotted a theme here!) in the Drawing Room of the Titanic Hotel. This is where plans were drawn up for ships built in the Belfast shipyard. Unlike the unskilled workers, these employees enjoyed good working conditions, and this room is beautiful, flooded with natural light and certainly a nice place to while away an hour, contemplating everything we had seen in the museum.

On Sunday evening we launched a new BNMS initiative for our members. If you read last month’s blog, you’ll know that the BNMS does a lot of great work, but I did feel that, as well as cheaper conference registration and a copy of the NMC, it would be nice to give something a bit more personal and tangible to those of us who are BNMS members. To this end, we hosted a welcome event on the Sunday evening which was free for members. Non-members were still able to come, but they had to be accompanied by a member, and there was a £10 charge for them. The event took place in a venue in the Belfast cathedral quarter called The Dark Horse, and we provided food and a drink for everyone. As well as that, we had a couple of talks organised. I did wonder what people would think of listening to a ‘talk’ on a Sunday evening, but it was so much more than that. Joe O’Sulllivan is an academic clinical oncologist and Clinical Director of the Northern Ireland Cancer Centre, and has a clear passion for prostate cancer treatment. Joe is a brilliant, charismatic speaker and gave us an absolutely fantastic overview of the work being done in Belfast and elsewhere on Radium therapy. Honestly, I think we were all mesmerised – we were all literally hanging off his every word. The evening was a great success, so is definitely something we will be repeating next year.

On to the conference itself. Opening the meeting was fairly terrifying, and of course, a little bit of the old Imposter Syndrome reared its head, but I pushed it firmly back down. It’s always a bit scary at the beginning, but as the meeting went on, confidence grew, and so many of you were so kind! When you’re speaking to a large group of people it’s easy to feel like everyone is going to be a critic, but my experience of our BNMS family is that everyone is, in fact, a cheerleader. Thank you all so much for your support.

Following on from the conference opening address, this year we decided to present the highlights lectures at the start of the meeting. The idea was that this would help you navigate the programme. We had separate Clinical, Scientific and RTN highlight presentations. It was a new thing for us, and it will be interesting to hear the feedback on it. From my own point of view, I thought it was more useful, although we can probably refine it a bit further. I also feel the people putting together the highlights lectures put such a lot of work into it, it was nice for them to present to a full room, rather than at the end, when some people have had to leave.

I then realised I had to speak at the President’s Reception. It should have been fairly obvious I’d need to speak, but it hadn’t registered! Mild panic ensued – I’d used all my best material in the morning opening speech! But it went OK, and we proceeded to enjoy a lovely couple of hours in the exhibition hall networking, meeting up with old friends and hopefully making new ones. I include our Industry partners in this – the exhibition was great, and several people commented on this. Furthermore, the food throughout the three days was really very good. If you’ve ever been involved in organising events, you’ll know the food is difficult to get right, but the feedback at the meeting was overwhelmingly positive and speaking of food, I really do have to mention the Conference Dinner at this point. It was held at Belfast City Hall and what an amazing venue. I had the privilege of presenting the President’s Medal to Dr. John Buscombe, who needs no introduction. I’ve known John for about 25 years, having worked with him at the Royal Free so many years ago, so it was really special to be able to recognise all he has done over the years for Nuclear Medicine and for the Society. He’s been a brilliant advocate for British Nuclear Medicine across the world. I also presented the Roll of Honour to Dr. Beverly Ellis. This is a recently established award for outstanding contribution to Nuclear Medicine and Radiopharmacy, and Bev has definitely done that, working diligently behind the scenes to provide support and guidance to Radiopharmacy and Nuclear Medicine. A big shout out has to go the inimitable Dr. Glen Flux, recipient of the Norman Veall Medal who has done so much for Radionuclide therapy and associated dosimetry in the UK and the worthy winner of the RTN award was Prof. Peter Hogg, who has been a great ambassador for Nuclear Medicine in the wider world of Radiology and advanced practice. All four of them are utterly brilliant. I know that being recognised by their peers meant a lot to all of them, so it is definitely one of the perks of being President that you are able to be part of that. I must also mention the honorary membership award, which was presented by Sue Hatchard to Steve Anderson, previously of Bright Technologies. This was pretty special for a couple of reasons. Firstly, as many of you will remember, as Charlotte’s predecessor, Sue was an integral part of the BNMS for many years, and I would argue has achieved legendary status for many of us. And secondly, because this is the first time such an award has been made to someone from Industry. Over the last few years, the relationship between the BNMS and Industry has definitely become a partnership, and it was nice to recognise that – and I know from speaking to Industry colleagues the day after the dinner that recognition of Steve’s contribution to the BNMS felt like a recognition of them all.

The content of the meeting was fantastic, and huge thanks need to go to the SEC chairs and committee members, and to our wonderful BNMS staff, who make all this possible. They’ve all worked incredibly hard, and it showed. We had so many great papers and posters to choose from. Please take some time to review the abstracts in NMC. And this year, rather than having the educational talks all front loaded into a bootcamp, they were spread throughout the meeting, something I thought worked well. There were so many brilliant invited talks too, I can’t talk about them all here, but I do have to mention a few. The first was our Annual Lecture, this year given by Prof. Ian Law from Copenhagen University Hospital, who gave us a great insight into state of the art neuro PET imaging. He was another great speaker, and the allotted hour flew by. I also really enjoyed a talk given by Dr. Samantha Terry from Kings College London on Auger Electron Therapy and the updates from Dr. Jennifer Young on new work being done by Radionuclides for Health with Iodine 124 and Astatine-211. We also had a talk on considerations for trans and non-binary patients with cancer as well as one on improving the experience of gender non-conforming patients. Both were well attended, and it makes me so proud that we are an inclusive society who want to support and provide compassionate care to all our patients. There was plenty on MRT and theranostics, and some brilliant talks on Total Body PET. This is definitely going to be a big talking point going forward. But what was also really good was there were also plenty of interesting general Nuclear Medicine talks and I think the balance between everything was pretty much perfect. What exciting times we have ahead of us - I feel so fortunate to be working in Nuclear Medicine now, despite the challenges we all face around resources and staffing.

I do also have to mention one poster which struck a real cord with me personally, and this was one about how to make our services more dementia friendly. As you know, this is a subject close to my heart and there are simple things which we can do to better support people who are unfortunate enough to suffer from this awful disease. For example, not booking appointments towards the end of the day, when people living with dementia may experience heightened confusion, something called ‘sundowning’, which can start in late afternoon.

You probably know about the still very recent loss of my mum. She was my confidant, the person I told about all the highs and lows of my life and this was most definitely a high. All of you who have lost people you love dearly will know it is a journey and I did feel sad that I couldn’t call her after the conference to tell her all about it. She would have been so proud and pleased for me. But the BNMS is not just about sharing learning and experience; in Nuclear Medicine we support each other. So sharing my impressions of Belfast with all of you is what I’m doing instead. To all of you who attended it gave me a much needed lift to share the experience with you, so thank you. I hope you enjoyed the conference as much as me, and that you also found lots of things in it to further improve the already great services being provided by you across the country.

If you weren’t able to attend this time, please do think about joining us in Glasgow next year from 19th – 21st May. If you are struggling to get funding for this, and are a Radiographer, Technologist or Nurse, have a look at the Ros Breen fund – you can find information on it on our website. Ros was a Superintendent Radiographer at Southampton General Hospital who made a great contribution to the field on Nuclear Medicine Technology and this fund was set up in memory of her to support RTN colleagues to come to the conference. I’m not sure if people know about it, as we don’t get lots of applications, so have a look to see if it might help you.

The conference offers us a great opportunity to reflect on what we have learnt in the last year, and to make plans for the next. Let’s make it amazing. Until the next time.

Ms Jilly Croasdale
BNMS President