Report of a consultants' meeting on distant learning in radiopharmacy

Education in radiopharmacy is currently organised in a somewhat fragmented manner, with, at least until recently, little co-ordination or co-operation between different regions or organisations. The delivery of education in such a specialised field suffers from a number of intrinsic problems: only small numbers of students are normally present in any one region and are often widely dispersed geographically. There are a limited number of expert teachers available, and limited funds available to organise courses. Both students and teachers are only able to devote a limited amount of time to such education since, except for a few exceptions, there is currently no formal requirement for continuing professional development and therefore no allocation of funds or time for such activities. Current programmes are unable to cope with the demand even in the developed world. For example, in the US there are insufficient Nuclear Pharmacist available to fill the available posts and in Europe more courses are required to support the Postgraduate specialisation scheme. In the developing world the small number of existing courses are able to meet only a fraction of the need. A recent IAEA survey has shown that the number of gamma cameras installed in the developing world has doubled in the last five years. These facilities require associated radiopharmacy services and the personnel providing those services need to be trained. Thus, availability of courses remains a major difficulty and most practitioners in the field do not have adequate access to courses of the appropriate level and intensity. A distance-learning approach has significant attractions for delivery of a specialised body of education to a widely dispersed audience and this provides a further opportunity for centralised support of Radiopharmacy education. Through such an approach, it would be possible to provide a body of teaching material which could be used for a variety of different courses operating on different levels and suitable for different groups of students. Although different formats are available for distance learning programmes, an Internet approach has a number of advantages, since although initial set-up costs may be relatively high, distribution and subsequent updating costs are low. The use of an HTML (World Wide Web) approach for supply of educational material has the additional advantage that it would be relatively easy to tier the level of difficulty of the course in order to tailor it to the individual requirements of the student. Thus it could be readily envisaged that the opening pages of a particular topic would provide a foundation level with subsequent pages becoming more and more advanced. The appropriate level for groups of professional could be identified, but the interested student could progress further if he or she desired