Report of the 2020 British Nuclear Medicine Society survey of nuclear medicine equipment, workforce and workload.

Abstract

The British Nuclear Medicine Society (BNMS) survey represents the only resource that brings together detailed information on equipment, workforce and workload from the practice of nuclear medicine in the UK. This article is a report of the most recent BNMS survey which was collected during 2019 and 2020. The survey used two methods to collect data: for equipment and workforce, participants created or updated existing online records; for workload information, respondees were asked to submit 12 months of data from local radiology information systems. Following the survey, the BNMS database contained a total of 191 sites (63% of known sites) having either equipment or workforce data or both. In total 39 centres provided workload data which included over 175 000 examinations. A combination of automated tools and visual inspection were used to clean, sort and validate submitted data into formats that allowed further analysis and extraction of useful parameters. Results are presented that the authors believe may be useful for nuclear medicine professionals and other stakeholders. Potential applications include benchmarking for service review and equipment replacement/updating. The survey represents a valuable resource that might be used by the BNMS secretariat to respond to specific queries from BNMS members.