Image
PET Technologist Amandeep Minhas
By Dustin Godfrey
A shortage of positron emission tomography (PET) technologists is leading to long wait-times for urgent scans and causing burnout among those left in the field.
Positron emission tomography scans aren’t theoretically always used in oncology, but because of the shortage of workers, cancer care has in practice become the sole use for the technology. And even with limiting PET scans to oncology, urgent scans are still stuck in an eight-week wait time on average.
That’s four times the goal of two weeks for urgent scans, said PET tech and HSA member Amandeep Minhas.
And the shortage is something that could be solved, Minhas added.
Minhas has been working in the field for 11 years now, and she says it’s really rewarding work.
“I do love it, even with the burnout and all the extra stress,” Minhas said. “Very rewarding to be a part of patients’ journeys and kind of guide them through their cancer care and diagnosis and things like that.”
To become a PET technologist, a person first goes through the nuclear medicine diploma program at BCIT before writing an exam to be certified as a nuclear medicine technologist. The BCIT program gives students “a little taste” of PET scans, but to get into a career with the technology, a bit more is required.
A person can go through a PET/CT certificate program through the Canadian Association of Medical Radiation Technologists, or they can get on-the-job training directly through the BC Cancer Agency.
PET scans involve injecting a patient with a radioactive tracer and letting it circulate throughout the body for about 45 minutes. And the scan itself, which takes 10 to 30 minutes, looks at how the body’s cells metabolize the tracer.
On top of that, PET technologists take the time to explain to their patients how the procedure works, meaning the whole procedure can take an hour and a half to two hours.
But with staffing shortages, some of those scans have to get postponed, Minhas said.
If a technologist calls in sick, for instance, the patients that staff member was supposed to see would have their appointments cancelled unless someone is able to take on some overtime. But that becomes more challenging when you’ve got a workforce experiencing burnout.
“Everybody's urgent in oncology, unfortunately, but we try to pick the ones that are slightly less urgent and cancel those ones,” Minhas said.
And while the eight-week wait time is already far beyond the two-week goal, Minhas said it’s likely to get worse as staffing issues continue. To add to that, PET scans are expected to increase in demand by about 30 per cent in the coming years with the increase in cancer cases among an aging population.
While the province has a number of cancer centres, only three of them — Vancouver, Kelowna and Victoria —include PET scanners, and all three of them are short-staffed, Minhas said.
Part of the issue, she said, is that there’s not only a shortage of PET technologists but of nuclear medicine technologists as well. The BCIT program for introducing new technologists to the field only accepts 16 people each year, with those graduates then having to choose to do even more training to become a PET technologist.
And with the most recent collective agreement giving nuclear medicine technologists a much-needed raise, the drive for some to go into PET is diminished, Minhas said. This is especially true when the isotopes PET technologists are potentially exposed to have much higher radiation energy levels.
The technologists are always well within safe levels of radiation exposure, Minhas noted, but it is still an extra hazard for workers.
The province is opening new PET centres, including in Burnaby and Cloverdale, in the coming years. But Minhas asks how that will help if the existing PET centres are already struggling with adequate staffing.
“We’ve asked these questions. We get kind of mixed responses,” Minhas said, noting that the earliest PET centres that are set to open are still several years away.
“So I think the people that get to make those choices think they have time still.”
The province says it’s looking beyond its borders to recruit PET technologists from afar, but this stirs up its own questions about how, exactly, that will work.
“Winnipeg was in the news recently because they just got a brand new multimillion dollar PET scanner. And it's currently sitting empty because there's no one to staff it, which is where I feel like Vancouver or B.C. will be going once these other centres open up,” Minhas said.
To make matters worse, Minhas said PET technologists in B.C. are paid less than in some other provinces — and that’s despite the province having the highest cost of living.
“So to recruit people from Alberta and Ontario, where they have substantially lower costs of living and higher wages, it really seems unlikely that people are going to come to B.C. for less money and higher rent, higher gas, higher cost of everything,” Minhas said.
To solve the issue, Minhas said the government needs to offer a more competitive wage, both compared to nuclear medicine and compared to other provinces, and find a way to offer more training seats.