Nuclear Medicine Training: Skills and Competencies Required for Practice in the 21st Century.

Nuclear medicine (NM) utilizes unsealed radiation sources to diagnose and treat diseases. In the NM team, the NM physician works in collaboration with many other NM professionals who play critical roles in care delivery to patients. The NM team, therefore, consists of the NM physicians, the radiochemists, the medical physicists, and NM technologists, and others. Each of these groups in the NM team has made signi fi cant contributions to the fi eld of NM, resulting in amazing growth over thelast two decades or so. 1 Thisgrowth with implications for a promising feature for NM has been in the form of improvement in instrumentation, advances in radiopharmaceutical synthesis, the introduction of novel diagnostic and therapeutic radiopharmaceuticals, optimiza-tion of dosimetry methods, and, consequently, broadening of the applications of NM techniques in the clinics. While this growth occurring in all aspects of the fi eld has made the future of the profession exciting, it has also come with a need for residency training to evolve to produce NM physicians with the requisite skill sets and competencies that make them suitable to deliver ef fi cient care in the 21st century. In this editorial, I will focus on the emerging skill sets and competencies that NM trainees need to acquire in their residency training to render fi t-for-purpose diagnostic and therapeutic NM care in the 21st century.