Profile

I live in the West of Scotland with my husband and daughter (aged 2.5). I love Harry Potter, music and supporting Dundee United. I’ve read all the Harry Potter books and watched all the films loads of times and have visited the Wizarding World of Harry Potter in Florida. I play 5 different musical instruments and love to play in orchestras and sing at church and in choirs. Dundee United are a bit rubbish just now but we’ll be great again one day!

I work in the Nuclear Medicine department in the biggest inpatient hospital in the UK. I share an office with 2 colleagues and we’re lucky enough to have a window (most of the department doesn’t)! We give people radioactive injections, gas or food to help find out what’s wrong with them. We take pictures of where the radioactive tracer has gone inside the patient using a scanner called a gamma camera to figure out what the problem is. The doctors can then decide how best to make the patient better. We do loads of different tests – if you’ve got a part of your body that does something, we have a test to look at it! The most common test we do looks at bones so we get pictures of the skeleton. Most of what I do is behind the scenes doing things like processing images, deciding exactly what pictures we should take, checking we have done tests correctly, deciding how best to do each kind of test, helping to doctors understand the pictures and making sure we don’t break any laws about working with radiation.

I do all kinds of different things and exactly what I do changes every day. Some of the more common things are to check patient scans to decide if more pictures are needed to answer the doctor’s question, make checks on what the people working in the department are doing to make sure we aren’t breaking the law (there are lots of laws when you work with radiation!), decide on the best test for a patient to have to answer the doctor’s question, work out the best way to do a new test, report patient scans with a doctor, talk to doctors in other departments and to patients to make sure they understand the tests we do, teach and train staff so they can work safely in Nuclear Medicine and look at the results of tests we’ve done to work out if we are getting the right answers or not.