New Year 2025 Honours: Hawke’s Bay medical scientist Prue Lamerton made ONZM

Prue Lamerton, who moved to Hawke's Bay 15 years ago after discovering a warmer climate, has been made an officer of the Order of New Zealand (ONZM) for services to medical science, including leading the way in providing local scanning for possible cancer patients. Photo / Supplied

A trip from Wellington to Hawke’s Bay, with the temperature improving about 20C along the way, pretty much sealed it for Prue Lamerton and husband John when they decided to get out of the city rat race.

Prue Lamerton, who moved to Hawke's Bay 15 years ago after discovering the warmer climate, has been made an officer of the Order of New Zealand (ONZM) for services to medical science, including leading the way in providing local scanning for possible cancer patients. Photo / Supplied

But it wasn’t just for their own good; the whole of Hawke’s Bay has benefited from their move to Havelock North 15 years ago.

Prue has now been made an officer of the Order of New Zealand (ONZM) for services to nuclear medicine in the New Year 2025 Honours.

She’s been at the cutting edge in New Zealand and globally for four decades.

In 2002 Lamerton collaborated on the first delivery in New Zealand of selective internal radiation therapy (SIRT) to treat liver tumours and was involved in implementing New Zealand’s first PET/CT scanner in 2006.

After relocating to Hawke’s Bay in 2009, she worked to improve access for patients to nuclear medicine imaging, advocating for the then-district health board to establish a new scanner in 2016. In 2021 she undertook the first SPECT-PSMA scan for prostate cancer, a procedure previously unavailable regionally.

The crowning glory, after dedicating two years to establishing a Molecular Imaging and Therapy Centre in Hawke’s Bay to save patients travelling outside of the region, was the opening of the new facilities by Canopy Health in Hastings last month.

Lamerton has travelled to numerous countries in her career and was actively involved nationally and internationally with the Australian and New Zealand Society of Nuclear Medicine (ANZSNM) for more than 20 years. She served on the New Zealand Medical Radiation Technologists Board for 11 years, and in 2022 she received the ANZSNM Dr Elizabeth Bailey Lecture Award.

She said she had been planning to retire, but there was a global shortage in the field and she had a mission to see that more were trained for the challenges ahead.

The daughter of an optometrist, she said she felt “very honoured” to have been recognised, with a tinge of regret.

“I wish my father was alive to see it,” she said.