Effects of recent nuclear reactor shutdowns in Europe

March 25, 2010

Nuclear Medicine is re-evaluating and prioritizing our patient needs on a weekly basis as we are made aware of our supply of isotopes.

During the past two weeks the Nuclear Medicine service has seen significant reductions in the amounts of medical isotope Tc99m available for use. Thunder Bay Regional Health Sciences Centre and Regional Cancer Care have received approximately 20% of our weekly supply from our supplier.

"We are cautiously hopeful that this international shortfall will remedy itself, our priority right now is to mitigate our risks," says Michael Power, VP of Regional Cancer Care.

"We have been informed we will be receiving additional quantities of Tc99m next week which will allow us to perform all the cardiac work delayed from the past two weeks caused by reduced supply. Should this supply continue we will be operating without any patient delays."

How we are Mitigating Risks:

1. Daily and weekly attention is being paid to this by management at TBRHSC to ensure we are high priority on suppliers list.
    
2. Through Thunder Bay Regional Research Institute we are able to now offer our patients clinical trials in PET imaging and Flourine-18 isotopes.
    
3. As a result of our access to PET scanning we have been able to divert some of our patients requiring bone scans to this modality to further reduce our reliance on the limited amounts of Tc99m. Utilizing this approach we have been able to maintain services for the most vulnerable, high priority patients and only minimally delaying the non-urgent out- patient based patients.
    
4. In the past two weeks we've used prioritization tools initially issued through Cancer Care Ontario and have reduced our services by re-scheduling non-urgent out-patient cardiac testing (which required the most isotope) to future dates when Tc99m will be more available - prioritizing our limited supplies to oncology uses such as Sentinel node studies, bone scanning and all in-patient studies.