This month has been much more planned than last month, but it has been busy both at work and at home. At home we had Remembrance Sunday, which involved Mr H marching with his Brass Band and playing the Last Post in Egremont and Isobel marching with her junior brass band in Distington. I accompanied Isobel, she did well, it was a long way to walk and play her instrument #proudmum .

We also had a few kid’s birthday parties and friends up for a visit, and with brass band jobs in the run up to Christmas we are all out of weekends. Still it helps us feel festive, along with starting to prepare for Christmas, buying and wrapping presents and sending them to Santa, as well as sorting through the decorations and thinking about food to eat over the holidays. I found all the Christmas cards and have written the list to see how many more to buy – we always seem to have loads too many or not enough, never just the right amount.

At work I have been on a number of training courses, both internal and external. The internal ones are about how we would deal with skin and wound contamination and radiological spillage assessments. Both were interesting as we invited other sites to send representatives so we could see how others do things, as well as discuss our site procedures.  The external course was a National Arrangements for Incidents involving Radioactivity (NAIR) course run by Public Health England, I am now an on-call Radiation Protection Advisor (RPA) including NAIR responder. Most of the rest of the attendees were people who worked in the health service and it really opened my eyes to the diversity of people who could respond to an event. Having not done much RPA Continuing Professional Development recently – it was a bit of a shock to do 3 days in 2 weeks, too many Bequerels all at once!

In the world of Society for Radiological Protection (SRP) we had the Engagement Directorate Board meeting where we discussed the SRP Annual Conference (booking is now open at the Early Bird rate). The Events Committee is assessing all the abstracts submitted and determining the programme. No spoilers here but keep your eyes peeled for the programme coming out soon. Outreach Committee are gearing up for their events in March and April; if you want to get involved and join the #YellowTshirtTeam, then get in touch with admin@srp-org.uk. Communications Committee is planning an SRP members’ survey and the Rising Generation Group is getting on with planning an RPA/Radiation Waste Advisor/Medical Physics Expert portfolio event in 2020.

In December there will be guest blog by Pete Bryant, SRP President, so this is my last blog in 2019 – I want to take this opportunity to thank you for reading my blog this year and to wish you a good Christmas. I will be back, refreshed, in January 2020.

Merry Christmas!                   

You can get in touch on the usual details.

Jennifer Humphries

SRP Director of Engagement

Twitter - @jenkhumphries

Email - engagement@srp-uk.org