Well it is a new year. Hopefully, some of you have received the first dose of the COVID vaccine by now. It does look like this wave may be worse than the first especially related to the new variant of COVID. We may face new disruption to nuclear medicine services as hospitals fill up and resources are diverted from routine care though we hope at least cancer services will be retained. Some of you may volunteer for extra duties to help your hospitals and we as a Society appreciate all you are doing in this difficult time. Also, you may end up as a part-time child carer or teacher. Well hopefully you will be able to teach biology, maths and physics.

It is with a heavy heart I report that this horrible virus has taken the life of Dr Donal O’ Donaghue, the Registrar to the Royal College of Physicians in London. Donal was a true friend of nuclear medicine. He would always tell us his truthful opinion and suggest ways we can proceed with the issues important to the practice of nuclear medicine. He supported the registration of nuclear medicine technologists and his passing is a great loss.

Whilst all this was going on the transition period part of Brexit ended. We will have to see how this will impact on the delivery of radiopharmaceuticals throughout the UK. There were some delays in delivery of some Mo/Tc generators in the first week of January but this appears to be related to the change in the law in the Netherlands. The best answer is for us to have a UK based source of Mo-99 and generator production. A couple of years ago this seemed impossible but there are now two proposals for such production using two different technologies. Maybe in the future the UK can become one of the world’s leaders in radionuclide production as we were in the 20^th century.

We need something to look forward to. In May the team at the Royal Free Hospital, London will host a virtual spring meeting and we hope to expand our offering allowing for 2 streams giving more choice. We will offer hub registration again so all nuclear medicine departments in the UK can participate in the meeting. With over 300 attendees in the last virtual meeting we hope that many more can join this meeting. During this meeting we hope to have some company symposia and we will also have our AGM.

New radiopharmaceuticals are coming our way. We hope to get a HRG for Tc-99m PDP for cardiac amyloid and Tc-99m PSMA. In the world of PET F-18 DOPA has been approved and we expect at least one form of PSMA PET imaging to be authorised and we may also have Lu-177 PSMA therapy so despite everything feeling a bit bleak at the moment there are some really exciting developments coming to us in 2021

Lastly can I wish you all a very happy and healthy 2021.

Dr John Buscombe

BNMS President