Nuclear medicine training : skills and competencies required for practice in the 21st century

Abstract

Nuclear medicine (NM) utilizes unsealed radiation sources to diagnose and treat diseases. In the NM team, the NM physician works in collaboration with many other NM professionals who play critical roles in care delivery to patients. The NM team, therefore, consists of the NM physicians, the radiochemists, the medical physicists, and NM technologists, and others. Each of these groups in the NM team has made significant contributions to the field of NM, resulting in amazing growth over the last two decades or so. This growth with implications for a promising feature for NM has been in the form of improvement in instrumentation, advances in radiopharmaceutical synthesis, the introduction of novel diagnostic and therapeutic radiopharmaceuticals, optimization of dosimetry methods, and, consequently, broadening of the applications of NM techniques in the clinics. While this growth occurring in all aspects of the field has made the future of the profession exciting, it has also come with a need for residency training to evolve to produce NM physicians with the requisite skill sets and competencies that make them suitable to deliver efficient care in the 21st century. In this editorial, I will focus on the emerging skill sets and competencies that NM trainees need to acquire in their residency training to render fit-for-purpose diagnostic and therapeutic NM care in the 21st century.