OTTAWA - Canada's nuclear medicine community is worried about layoffs if the isotope crisis drags on much longer.
Two nuclear medicine groups say health-care providers sometimes find themselves idle at the end of the week because they don't have enough isotopes to do diagnostic scans.
But hospitals still have to pay staff to be there all week because they don't always know what their shipments will look like.
The Canadian Association of Nuclear Medicine and the Ontario Association of Nuclear Medicine are warning that hospitals may soon cut staff to cut costs.
Isotopes have a shelf life of mere days and cannot be stockpiled, so staff scramble to book patients for tests before the particles decay.
There haven't yet been reports of pink slips making the rounds but doctors warn that could change as clinics cope with rising costs for isotopes and staff overtime.
