Some surprises are nice, others less so. Who does not like a surprise party? Well me for a start. I never know what to say or do. However, we are in the time of surprises. This was meant to be my last blog. It should be full of homilies thanking the amazing office staff, Charlotte and Caroline. The Officers and Council of the BNMS and you as members for putting up with me however COVID has changed everything. The Annual Meeting and therefore the AGM has been cancelled. It was decided that the Officer, Council and Committee members remain in post until we have a special AGM at the Autumn meeting, that is if we can have an Autumn meeting. It has been suggested that instead of September all office holders stay in post until May 2021. As this would be an amendment to our Articles of Association it would need to be approved by the membership either at a special AGM or if that is not possible a virtual AGM. More details after our next Council meeting which we will have using “zoom” in June.

My wife retired from being a GP in January but has been called back up to work again. She was surprised (but I was not) by the she number of electronic forms she needed to fill in and the number of times she needed to wave her passport and driver’s license before her web cam to get back to work. Evidently, she needed to prove her identity again and again because the results of the previous phone call or video call were always lost. She agreed to worth by video or phone link from home and thought she would go back to work in the London Borough of Newham which as I write has the highest rate of COVID-19 infection, COVID-19 deaths and COVID-19 dead GPs in the whole of the UK (and now Europe) but was surprised to find she was assigned by 111 to the outer suburbs of Manchester!!

I think many of us are also surprised by how COVID-19 has paralysed our other work. Where are the patients whom we normally see? Many of us are particularly concerned about the fall in cancer cases we see either for nuclear medicine or PET imaging. About 2 weeks ago I was asked to propose how we get back to work and subsequently the BNMS published guidelines looking towards at least getting to see our most urgent patients. Since then the government seem to have frozen the expected date for restarting of our services in 5^th May has come and gone. As the number of COVI|D patients fall we need to start work on our routine nuclear medicine otherwise we are in danger this inertia in the health system may kill as many people as the virus itself.  A report today suggested that across the NHS 7 million appointments need to be re-arranged though not all in nuclear medicine

Like almost the whole country I made sure I listened to the Prime Minister announce how the country would get out of lockdown. Like most of England at the end I was unsure what was going to happen. As I write this however, there is no advice on how and when we get back to normal nuclear medicine practice which I hope we can before my June blog.

Dr John Buscombe

BNMS President