Quote:
Originally Posted by MolsonExport
Can you affiliate with a research hospital (e.g., Dal)? Or maybe partner with a colleague that is affiliated with a research school so you can publish your work (and get conference funding, etc.)?
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Since I am a faculty member at Dalhousie University, the answer would be yes.
It's not something I would strive to do now. I'm nearing the end of my career (retirement in 2-5 years depending on how ornery I get).
At the time this was happening though, there was a lot going on. I was just ending my seven year tenure as Chief of the Department of Medical Imaging at my hospital and I was tired. Our department at the time was small (then about 7-8 members, now 13 members), and we were swamped with clinical responsibilities and on call obligations. My children at the time were also at a very interesting stage, and I was already missing out on a lot of their growing up. I had very little time or energy for anything.
In a larger teaching/research hospital, the place tends to be crawling with residents. The residents are responsible for a lot of the day to day operational requirements of the hospital, and do most of the on call duties. This frees up the attendings for teaching, research and administrative responsibilities. I had no such luxury at my hospital. Our responsibilities are primarily clinical.
I could have contacted the academic head of radiology at Dalhousie (since I was a member of his department), and asked about support for publication. This would have required a formal research proposal, and approval from the research and medical ethics committees. I still would not have had a resident to assist me or compile the research data since we don't have residents in my clinical department. I would still have been responsible for this. Importantly though, departmental statisticians would have been made available to ensure the statistics were valid and significant. I would then have written a paper for peer review.
The reviewers would probably have cast a jaundiced eye at the paper though since it came from a non research hospital (albeit affiliated with Dalhousie), and the author (me) is not a certified nuclear medicine physician (requires a two year fellowship on top of a four year radiology residency). I have six months nuclear medicine incorporated into my general residency, which is more than enough to supervise a non academic nuclear medicine department in a community hospital.
I thought about publishing it at the time, but I decided I was just too busy otherwise, and that I was satisfied that we were making significant strides in modifying this new technology to suit our local requirements in Moncton. I decided I was happy enough with that.
I said that we had one of the first diagnostic grade SPECT/CT scanners in the world (third one in the world actually). We now have
two of these machines at the hospital, and these types of hybrid SPECT gamma cameras and helical CT scanners are now pretty ubiquitous. The funny thing is that the nuclear medicine department in Halifax
still does not have diagnostic SPECT/CT.
The government in NS cheaped out on them, only letting them buy units with low dose (non diagnostic) CT components allowing them to do attenuation correction for cardiac nuclear medicine studies, but not full anatomic imaging. We probably would have been turned down by the NB government at the time too, we just didn't tell the government exactly what we were up to. We
did use the scanner for attenuation correction, it just so happened the CT was powerful enough for full anatomic imaging too........
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