Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I will be brief.
As you have identified, I'm the special adviser to the Minister of Health. My day job is as chair of the department of oncology at the University of Alberta. I'm also a previous chair of the department of radiology at the same university. I'm a nuclear medicine physician with an active therapeutic practice at the Cross Cancer Institute in Edmonton. I'm Dr. Atcher's predecessor as president of the International Society of Nuclear Medicine. I'm also a past president of both the Canadian Association of Nuclear Medicine and the Canadian Society of Nuclear Medicine.
As Dr. Atcher has correctly identified, there is an impact on our patients caused by the shutdown of Chalk River. Since the initial shutdown at the end of 2007, the community has had a working group in place that includes members of the nuclear medicine community, the oncology community, the cardiology community, as well as members of Health Canada, looking at ways of ameliorating the crisis. We have attempted to provide guidelines for our clinical colleagues on how to best utilize available resources. I think that the guidelines we have published and continue to modify have helped to ameliorate the impact of this on our patients.
In particular, we have recognized the importance of providing as accurate a guideline as we can of the supply of molybdenum. One of the key issues at the beginning of the shortage was the unreliability of this supply prediction. Over the last four to six weeks we've been able to provide a more consistently reliable guide to our clinical colleagues on the supply of molybdenum and the generators, and a more consistent expectation of what will be happening in the following week. This has helped to improve planning, patient flow, and the way our clinical colleagues have managed their departments and changed processes.
Now that we've survived the shutdown at Petten over August, with perhaps less disruption than we feared, we have to look to the medium term. AECL has indicated that it expects to be up and running in the first quarter of 2010. Our hope is that it is up and running before the planned six-month shutdown of Petten at the end of February.
We think it's important that we now start to again understand what the implications of the AECL startup are going to be. We really need to understand what regional disparities are occurring in the country. Some parts of the country have experienced very little disruption; some parts of the country have experienced significant disruption. One of my key tasks is to understand what those regional disparities are, what is causing them, and what we can do to help.
I think it's important to recognize the degree to which the community has made very significant changes to work practices to deal with the shortages, and the very significant involvement of all members of the community in ensuring that we can actually continue to supply our patients. We hope we will be able to continue the accurate indication of future supply, and we look forward to confirmation of when AECL will be able to reopen NRU.
Mr. Chairman, thank you for the opportunity to speak.