Firstly I promise not to use the B word in this month’s blog. September brings a new energy to our work. The weather gets colder, the DNA rate falls as patients think that coming to the hospital is more exciting than watching the next episode of “homes under the hammer”. No more do they sit in the gardens or down the park enjoying the sunshine. However, a new season brings new challenges and we need to think about how we will shape our work over the next few months.

Well a great start has been the Autumn BNMS which we have just had in Nottingham. We met at Albert Hall a wonderful Edwardian building that has been beautifully restored by City of Nottingham. We had some excellent session including one on sentinel nodes, another on PET-CT and PET-MR. A session on theranostics and a very well attended session on how new regulations may affect the practice of nuclear medicine. There were 90 delegates which worked very well for the room sizes and there was an excellent commercial exhibition and poster area that could be visited during the coffee, lunch and tea breaks. A massive congratulations to Charnie and Racheal for all their hard work setting the meeting up.

If you are now wishing you could have come to the BNMS meeting after all can I commend an upcoming meeting from one of our sister organisations. The Cyprus Society of Nuclear Medicine is having their 20^th birthday this year and a brilliant conference including nuclear medicine talent from around the world is being held in Cyprus from November 6^th-10^th. Details are on our website.

There has been some good news in that NHS England has agreed at last to fund F-18 Fluciclovene imaging in prostate cancer. We are hoping that funding can also be extended to those sites who perform PSMA PET. There are still some issues with availability of the product across England and training but we do hope that PET imaging of prostate cancer will be as easy to obtain for our patients and FDG imaging for other cancers.

A few of our longer term plans are also coming to completion over the next few weeks. The joint report on molecular radiotherapy will be published. The BNMS fellowships will start, look at the BNMS web site for details. We hope to have the Lutathera web site up and running. We are lobbying the government concerning the proposed 10% cut in nuclear medicine tariffs for next year and working with NICE on guidelines for the treatment of benign and malignant thyroid disease. It has been a busy few months but we are hoping for positive outcomes for the specialty.

See I got through this whole blog without mentioning Brexit. Oops broken my promise.

Dr John Buscombe

BNMS President