Overview
Radiopharmacy is a highly specialised area of pharmacy that provides a vital clinical service for patients requiring nuclear medicine scans and therapy. However, the field urgently needs to attract newly skilled pharmacists and scientists who can not only produce high quality radiopharmaceuticals, but who also have a passion to drive essential research and development within nuclear medicine. It is difficult for people to get access to radiopharmacy so our project involved making a short film to promote radiopharmacy accompanied by a series of videos to give students a virtual experience of working in the radiopharmacy and to help with training.
Project
We were awarded a grant from the Education Innovation Fund for our project (£4,500)
We have used the funding to produce a high quality promotional style film to inform pharmacy/science students about radiopharmacy as a career option. The film shows inside the radiopharmacy with interviews with 2 people who entered radiopharmacy by quite different routes. It gives a great insight into what it is like working in radiopharmacy. We will promote the film on the British Nuclear Medicine Society’s YouTube channel and share it with colleagues in the film who teach on undergraduate courses.
We are also in the process of making the short videos which can be used as training. We hope that we may be able to involve secondary school children in editing these videos. This is a great way to enhance STEM within the school. These films will be a fantastic resource for training within radiopharmacy as well as enabling students to get a unique insight into what it is like working in the radiopharmacy environment. We will promote these videos on the MSc in Healthcare Technologies course as well as making them accessible to our colleagues in the NHS for training.
BNMS website
Our main film about radiopharmacy has been uploaded to the British Nuclear Medicine Society Website YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCRm_qvKB-6alhKjWQZpHtOQ
This video highlights what radiopharmacy is about as well as encouraging students to think about this field as a potential career option. The video can be found here: https://youtu.be/qM47A82mz-E
Lecture to LJMU pharmacy undergraduates
The footage used for the radiopharmacy has been incorportated into lecture material for a lecture about Radiopharmacy for 2nd year pharmacy undergraduate students at Liverpool John Moore’s University. The lecture details aspects of infection control in the radiopharmacy.
Dr Maggie Cooper
Contact: Margaret.cooper@kcl.ac.uk
Dr Julia Blower
Contact: Julia.Blower@kcl.ac.uk