HEIW shortlisted for Moondance Cancer Awards!

Published: 23/05/24

The Moondance Cancer Awards celebrate and spotlight brilliant people across NHS Wales and its partners who deliver, lead and innovate cancer services.

These awards, recognise the achievements of people and teams working across all parts of cancer detection, diagnosis, and treatment pathways and showcase the innovation and improvement happening across the country.

Health Education and Improvement Wales (HEIW) has been shortlisted in collaboration with NHS Wales Joint Commissioning Committee (JCC) in the innovation & improvement category for a cancer workforce award.

This nomination for Positron Emission Tomography (PET) Workforce Planning acknowledges the work of Sarah Bant, Associate Director of Workforce Transformation, Healthcare Science at HEIW and her team.

Positron emission tomography (PET) is a central diagnostic tool in the management of patients with cancer. PET influences clinical decision making, with an increasing body of high-quality evidence to demonstrate the contribution of PET to improved patient outcomes and experience in cancer.

The workforce involved in delivering a PET service is highly regulated, highly specialised, and highly technical. Training is extensive and takes significant time. Furthermore, many areas of the workforce are facing national shortages and specialist staff within Wales nearing retirement. 

A PET workforce workstream was established as part of the JCC-led Programme. The workstream included representatives from all professional groups and all sites across Wales.

PET is essential for cancer diagnosis. It provides confidence in staging cancer, and it adds value by helping us to decide the most appropriate treatment for our patients. It improves the precision of radiotherapy. PET helps us to assess the response to anti-cancer treatment.

Over the last 7 years, Wales has been running an ambitious programme to upgrade its PET services to be equivalent to the best in the UK and in Europe. There are more PET scans, new types of types of PET scan, new PET centres.

This development will not work without a highly trained specialist workforce. This is in short supply in the UK and cannot simply be purchased off the shelf. Central to the Welsh PET project is a workforce workstream, led by HEIW, developing and investing in a strategic project to grow our own dedicated expertise, commented Martin Rolles, Consultant Clinical Oncologist, Swansea Bay University Health Board.