Gamma Camera

These are used in Nuclear Medicine Departments to take pictures of peoples insides. Gross! Working in Nuclear medicine departments is cool! you get to inject people with radioactive isotopes and take pictures of the results! Beats Happy Slapping any day. Some of the people you take pictures of are a bit poorly and are miserable. Downer, man! Others are perfectly alright but because they have got Money a rich doctor has persuaded them that they need a scan even though there is nothing wrong with them.This helps the rich doctor get even richer. This is called Private medicine. If you work in Private medicine you will probably get to play with a Gamma Camera like this one:

But if you work in the NHS your gamma Camera will probably look more like this, and break down a lot because it is very old:

What happens then is that your camera breaks down again but this time no-one can find any spare parts to fix it. Next some people with a nice new Gamma Camera at a Private Diagnostic Centre will come along and say to your hospital, "hey, why spend all that money on a new scanner? we will scan your poorly patients for you if you give us some money; it will be much cheaper." This seems like a good idea to the Finance Director and so your department closes down, and you get to go home and do lots of gardening and play Doom 3 a lot.

Next thing you know they renegotiate the Service Level Agreement and suddenly it costs a lot more to send people to the nice private scanner with the proper coffee and the posh carpets with no sick or wee in them, and the Hospital can't afford to send them there any more. Instead they have to go to another Hospital that still has a Nuclear Medicine department and wait a lot longer to have their inside pictures taken.

Maybe it would have been a better idea for the hospital to have bought a nice new scanner for the poorly people in the first place. I'm sure it can't be that simple though. Still what do I know? I'm only A Radiographer.

STR rating: posh gamma camera 9/10; broken gamma camera 0/10

Next week: Dean Windass